


Crown

by Chekhovs_Power_Loader



Category: American Horror Story: Apocalypse, American Horror Story: Coven
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blasphemy, Bondage, Canon-Typical Violence, Dream Manipulation, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, First Kiss, Insecure Michael, Oral Sex, Psychological Torture, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Romance, Science Experiments, Vaginal Sex, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2019-09-13 09:11:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 72,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16889715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chekhovs_Power_Loader/pseuds/Chekhovs_Power_Loader
Summary: Mallory goes undercover at a Satanic church and gets captured by the enemy. When she gets to know Michael Langdon, it turns out that they have more in common than she ever thought possible.





	1. Descent

“Please tell me it doesn’t look like  _that_.”

Michael watches the enormous blue sculpture of a horse with blazing red eyes retreat in the rear-view mirror. They’ve been driving along the freeway towards Denver for the better part of the night, and now that the airport is finally in sight—the supposed location of an underground megachurch devoted to the worship of his Father, where thousands are presently gathering to welcome the Son’s arrival on Earth—Michael is bracing himself for another disappointment.

Who knew that true darkness would be so elusive? Most of the so-called true believers he met so far have disgusted him, with their myriad petty sins and pathetic cravings of the flesh, but Madelyn has reassured Michael that this new congregation is different, that the souls in attendance are among the vilest he could ever hope to meet. After all, hasn’t the force of their combined transgressions against the Light smoothed the way for his prophesized birth?

“The locals call that thing Blucifer.” Madelyn says now, taking her bleary eyes off the road. “Isn’t it delightfully monstrous? But don’t knock the horse too much, my dear, before you hear the story about how it killed the sculptor who made it.” She gives him her warmest, most maternal smile. “Its head fell and severed an artery in his leg!”

Michael is glad to hear this.

“At least that hideous thing will be gone in the blast, along with everything else, and then we’ll never have to see it again. _If_ we choose to go with the nuclear option, that is.”

The problem is that he still doesn’t know what to do, how to end the world in the requisite style.

His associates in the Cooperative want to use science. A technological end for people that have become too dependent on technological gadgetry is what they envision, and they call it poetic justice: instant annihilation for a society hooked on instant gratification. For Michael, the idea of a magical Armageddon holds a lot more appeal. Where others have learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, he is a little more old-fashioned.

He pictures the earth cracking open to spew angry locusts. And infernal trumpets with mouthpieces carved from human bone. And creatures made entirely from living fire. And hailstones the size of a city block.  

“I still don’t understand why we couldn’t fly here,” he whines, turning around to look at Ms. Mead, who sits grim-faced in the backseat of the car, surrounded by shoe boxes and garment bags like a one-woman glam squad. “It’s a fucking airport, and it’s not like people don’t already associate it with the occult.”  

In another life, his Ms. Mead would regard him with infinite patience if he ever whined like that and then answer any and every question he had, ideally over a glass of milk and a plate of French toast. In this life, however, Ms. Mead is a) a robot and b) not really “his” Ms. Mead, so things are bound to be a little different.

Reborn of plastic and circuitry, the woman who raised him now chides Michael without even needing to open her black mouth. Her gun hand flexes a little and her eyes stay glued on the road.

 _Interact with her, she needs to learn from you_ , the roboticists told him. _You must build rapport, like any relationship_ , they instructed, as if building rapports has ever been Michael’s forte. _Most important of all, manage your expectations_. 

When the thing that wears the face of his Ms. Mead finally turns around to meet his questioning gaze, her expression softens just enough to maintain the illusion.

“You worry too much, Michael,” she says, and squeezes his shoulder a lot harder than he remembers. “Have you decided what you’re going to wear to the sermon?”  

“No. You decide for me.”

“Very well.” She fishes inside her black leather jacket for her phone, then swipes through the slideshow of outfits he modeled for the two ladies a few days before. “I think the wine-colored velvet cape with the ruby snakehead clasps is the clear winner.”

“Ooh, that’s my favorite as well,” Madelyn practically chirps. “With the crocodile Louboutins!”

As the car pulls into the parking lot, two men in black suits and secret service-looking earpieces come out of nowhere to escort them to the underground complex. They bow deeply before Michael, scraping the ground like medieval peasants swearing fealty to their lord. Taking advantage of this display of subservience, Ms. Mead loads their arms with bags from the car, and the group proceeds silently through the crowded terminal until they come upon a hidden passageway leading to an elevator that takes them down and down and down, as if descending into Hell itself.

All sorts of enchantments hide the entrance to the complex from the prying eyes of travelers and airport personnel alike, and Michael finds himself wondering who exactly put them there. Other than the voodoo queen named Dinah Stevens, he hasn’t met any dark witches and isn’t sure that he particularly wants to. 

After what feels like forever riding the elevator to Hell, they reach a huge cavern bathed in the dull orange glow of countless candles. It’s practically an underground city, much bigger than Michael imagined. Most of the buildings are black and severe in their modernist lines, connected with elegant footbridges and walkways, and a few seem to grow directly out of the rock or hang from the ceiling like manmade stalagmites.

Three black-robed figures come forward to greet Michael. A familiar face leads the Satanic delegation.

“Welcome, Sire, to the Unholy See.” Anton LaVey looks deeply honored to be in his presence again. 

More people begin to emerge from the buildings, regarding him with curiosity as they speak in hushed and reverential tones. They part around the group so the Black Pope can lead them to where they’ll be staying for the night. The women’s reactions are the most interesting to Michael. In passing, he glances at three younger ones standing on a nearby balcony, and what happens next blows him away.

One girl promptly falls backwards into a dead faint when her eyes lock with Michael's. Another girl manages to wave to him shyly, but then ruins it all by nearly tripping over herself in her rush back inside. The third one reaches under her gauzy black dress and pulls a long dagger from a holster strapped to her thigh, and slowly brings its sharpened tip to her chest.

Michael looks to his companions to gauge their reactions, but no one else is looking at the girl. Rather than trying to stop what is about to happen, Michael is transfixed, unable to look away.

A moment before the girl plunges the blade into her willing flesh, twisting the hilt into her sternum with astonishing force and a sickening crunch, her voice rings out clear as a bell: 

“Michael Langdon, it’s all for you!”

Then she tumbles over the railing, landing a dozen feet from where he stands.

Michael runs up to her and kneels down to grab her hand.

“What’s your name?”

The unknown girl blinks away her tears as she tries to speak. 

“Vanessa,” she manages to reply with great effort. Closing her eyes in satisfaction, she loosens her grip on the dagger and reaches up to touch his face with the bloody hand. 

“Hello, Vanessa. Now tell me: why did you do it?”

Michael really wants an answer to his question but the girl is fading fast.  _I’m not worthy of your devotion_ , he thinks a little bitterly.

“Hail Satan,” Vanessa pronounces before her words drown in a gurgle of blood and her head drops to the side.

Ms. Mead looks furious.

“Rein in your lunatics, Anton,” she warns an apologetic-looking LaVey. “I really hope that something like this doesn’t happen on the way to church tomorrow because we could only pack so many costume changes for the weekend, and I would hate to see the Antichrist looking less than his personal best on such a historical occasion, wouldn’t you?”

She regards the corpse on the ground like it’s a dog she wants to kick. “Stupid girl.”

“Of course, Miriam, it won’t happen again,” the Black Pope replies meekly, very conscious of the changed dynamics with his former cardinal.

As for Madelyn, she looks not angry but wistful, transported to some other plane of primordial evil that no light can ever reach. She had the same look on her face when she regaled them with stories of her first Black Mass back in the devil-mad eighties.

“Ah, nothing beats the enthusiasm of the young!”

*******

“You would never guess who I just saw coming out of the VIP lounge.” Coco St. Pierre Vanderbilt drops into the seat beside Mallory, a Bloody Mary in each hand. “Actually, you would! I always suspected that she sold her soul to the devil because there’s no way in hell she could ever become famous on her own merits. I heard that she bought a convent from some nuns and is remodeling it into some kind of pleasure palace. Look, there she goes!” She points to a prominent music celebrity walking near the stage whose name is on the tip of Mallory’s tongue.

“I told you to make mine non-alcoholic.” Mallory frowns at the swishing crimson fluid. It feels weird to be drinking in church, even a Satanic one, and doubly weird on a secret mission for the Coven. Feeling conspicuous in her disguise, she pulls the hood over her head and drops her voice to a whisper, tapping the program. “Our Supreme wouldn’t want us distracted right before he’s due to come on stage.”

“Liquid courage,” Coco supplies, and for the first time on the mission Mallory realizes just how terrified her friend really is. “Plus, we’ve got to stay in character to blend in. Have you taken a gander at the crowd? It’s not exactly your regular Sunday service in here.”

“Yes, that enormous upside-down Crucifix carved from darkest obsidian didn’t tip me off,” Mallory deadpans. “About that, actually. In the Catholic faith they would call that a Petrine Cross, a symbol of St. Peter’s martyrdom—a symbol of the papacy, actually.”

Coco rolls her eyes and goes on sipping her Bloody Mary through a straw, scanning the crowd for more celebrities who sold their souls to the devil.

Their church is a literal cave, its walls and ceiling made of uncut rock. The space is as large as a stadium and filling steadily with devil worshippers from all social classes. Red spotlights bathe everyone in a murderous glow. Thirty-foot-high flames dance on the jumbotron screen and “O Fortuna” blasts from the speakers as if the world is already ending. Anticipation for Michael Langdon is thunderous, an electric charge in the air, and Mallory has never seen a crowd more excited for anything in her life.

Coco is dressed sumptuously in Dolce & Gabbana, complete with a black fascinator and a veil pulled down over her eyes. The outfit makes Mallory think of a Sicilian widow who’s just fed her third husband a Limoncello laced with arsenic, whereas Mallory herself looks like a teenage goth from the wrong side of the tracks. That isn’t that far from the truth once you strip away the golden crown she usually wears at Miss Robichaux’s in a half-ironic attempt to disguise her past from snobs like Myrtle.

“That pop star we just saw, do you think she’s in the Cooperative?”

“No, all the Cooperative members wear masks. They would never show their faces to anyone below the highest echelon, even with all the secrecy,” the heiress explains. It’s not just that Coco understands social hierarchies better than Mallory ever could; she also suspects that her father of being vetted to join the Cooperative.

Mallory nods, shuddering at the thought. If it’s true about Mr. Vanderbilt being vetted by the Satanists, she wonders how Coco is really taking it, what hides behind that brave face she puts on. Mallory changes the subject.

“Hey, did I ever tell you that I went through a goth phase in high school?”

Coco looks her up and down skeptically, taking in the oversized black hoodie, the tattered Slayer t-shirt that belongs to her brother, and the artfully smudged black eyeliner that needlessly enlarges her already enormous doe eyes, making her a dead ringer for a tubercular orphan from a Victorian illustration. “Yep, I can see that for you.”

“I guess you could say I had a brief flirtation with darkness,” Mallory goes on. “It was right after everyone at school discovered my powers, and then everything went to absolute shit.”

“That’s really gratifying to hear, Mal.” Coco doesn’t believe her for a second. “Maybe you can tap into that darkness when these freaks start looking at us funny. Now, if only we could figure out a way to go backstage with those groupies over there.” She gestures to a block of seats occupied entirely by chattering young women and the occasional young man, all dressed fabulously in black and silver, with inverted crosses painted on their cheeks and foreheads.

“Keep your voice down. It feels so weird to be here without any back-up from our sisters—and without any powers! Not that yours would be very useful in this situation. Sorry.”

“Gee, thanks, Mal. But it’s totally true. I can’t even tell you how many calories are in this thing now.” Coco has finished her own drink and started on Mallory’s. “I’m going to need a lot of liquid courage tonight.”

She looks thoughtful for a moment. “You know, Mal, we really should have insisted on that identity spell. We’re in plenty of danger now, even without the false personas and memories. Cordelia would have totally relented.”

Mallory feels the same way. A human sacrifice is almost guaranteed to be on the cards for tonight, though the program is oddly euphemistic in its language, only mentioning a “traditional offering” at the end of the sermon.

A momentary reprieve from having to live inside your own skin, a conscience that you put on and take off like a dress—it all sounds very appealing to the girl who can’t even watch enemies of the Coven burn at the stake.

It’s a good thing that her powers are under lock and key.

*******

Two weeks earlier at Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies, Mallory sat in the dining room with the other girls, waiting for the butler to serve them lunch. It was a sunny afternoon in New Orleans and Cordelia was away on Coven business. Without the Supreme on the premises, no one felt particularly safe in the school, not even with her powerful wards protecting the grounds.

“Look, when I wanted to show him my gratitude, he declined. It was super-bizarre, but I suppose he could be gay. Anyway, he was more interested in my … sins than my body. I’m starting to think he’s just wired differently when it comes to certain things. When I promised him that I would try oh-so-hard to be good if he rescued me from retail hell, he just went,  _and why would you want to do a silly thing like that?_ ”

“That must have hurt. Maybe you’re losing your touch.”

“Very funny, bitch. I’m not the one with the killer vagina.” Madison glared at her frenemy as she played with her cigarette case, unable to light up inside the pristine white walls of the magic school. “All I’m trying to say is that if you’re looking to get close to him, you’re going to have to think of something else.”

“It was  _your_ idea to seduce him.”

Madison scrunched up her forehead like she had trouble remembering. “OK, so maybe it was. Look, Zoe, I know you expect me to know everything all the time, but even I get it wrong on occasion.”

She waved away the butler when he approached with a silver tray of finger sandwiches. “I won’t be having any of that, but thanks.”

“Why? Already snort your lunch?”

“Wow, so hilarious, Queenie. If you absolutely must know, I have a date. With a warlock. From Hawthorne’s.”

Silence fell all around, then somebody groaned. Given their shared history, witches simply didn’t date warlocks.

“Now before any of you sluts say anything mean about Christian, who is a rock-solid nine in the looks department, by the way, you should know that everything I do is for the Coven. Didn’t the Supreme say that our schools needed to cooperate more, what with the Chancellor being exposed as a traitorous bitch, oh, and I forgot to mention, the massive Antichrist-shaped threat we’re all facing?”

Queenie nodded at the surprising logic of her argument. “Hard dick diplomacy.” 

Madison winked. “Well, someone’s got to take the silver bullet. Or dick.”

“Girls, spare me the crude language. What would Myrtle say if she were here?”

The door had opened and Cordelia swept grandly into the dining room and took her usual seat at the head of the table. The whole Coven breathed a sigh of relief. Now that the Supreme was here, enveloping her charges with her calming magical aura like a mother duck spreading her wings over her errant ducklings, the future looked a little less bleak.

Cordelia’s eyes sought out Madison’s immediately, as if she’d heard the whole conversation from the hallway. “You know you’re not allowed to leave the school unaccompanied. If Christian really wants to see you, the boy’s going to have to come to the house.”

It was a good thing that Myrtle was away at Fashion Week, Mallory thought. The unnatural sight of a teenage warlock inside the pristine white walls of Robichaux’s would send the older witch into violent conniptions.

But there was no time for her to dwell on the Coven’s questionable attitude towards men or Madison’s questionable taste in them. A new game was afoot. Their Supreme had a plan. Cordelia had grown tired of waiting around for Michael to strike. It was time for the Coven to go on the offensive instead of staying prisoners in their own school. Pulling it off would take every bit of bravery, guile and resilience that her dear girls possessed.

Luckily, the Supreme had been gifted with another vision in which Michael appeared as a shepherd leading his flock of lost souls deep into the bowels of the earth. With a bit of lithomancy, she had filled in the blanks of the allegory and was able to figure out exactly where they needed to go, and when.

Mallory and Coco were the natural candidates for the mission because neither of them had met Michael before. Their magical ability had nothing to do with it, as they would not be using their powers in the underground complex, Cordelia said. Getting inside would be hard, and so would obtaining a small lock of Michael’s hair, but a single strand was all they needed to collect for whatever their Supreme had up her sleeve.

Queenie rubbed her hands with glee. Voodoo, the original “spooky action at a distance,” was her specialty and she seldom got a chance to perform it with the Coven.

“Dream on, slut. As if you could kill the Antichrist by hammering some nails into a Ken doll,” Madison scoffed.

Now it was Mallory’s turn to piss everyone off.

“Magical entanglement has all kinds of uses beyond just harming the victim whose physical essence you’ve put in a doll. I mean, just think about all the possibilities of establishing a psychic link with someone’s body and soul. One Grand Chancellor in the sixteenth century used it for espionage when he managed to entangle his mind with—”

“See? Tituba didn’t invent  _everything_.” Madison spoke over Mallory directly to Queenie.

Cordelia was growing impatient.

“Girls, we’re not here to discuss the relative merits of different magical traditions or to speculate about what I’ll be doing with the sample you collect. You have enough on your plate as is. What we need is a safe way to embed you in the congregation and get you close enough to _him_ without setting off any internal alarms.”

After lunch, she took Mallory aside and asked to speak in private. They went into Cordelia’s office and closed the heavy oak door. Mallory knew what was coming: lately the Supreme had been questioning her about the origins of her magic, prodding her to reveal any experiences she might have had with her powers developing throughout her childhood and adolescence, before she had learned to understand and control them.

“Mallory, there is a family of spells that I’ve been meaning to explore with some of the advanced students in this time of crisis. These are very ancient and very dangerous spells that are not to be attempted lightly because they interfere with the very fabric of reality. One is called  _Tempus Infinituum_. Now, you told me once that you’ve had a strange experience with temporal phenomena, with premonition, I think—”

“It wasn’t a premonition,” Mallory sighed. She had little choice about telling Cordelia exactly what had happened with her stepfather. But where to start?

She’d been eight years old and her brother eleven when their stepfather had moved in, and the man was volatile and drunk from the start, even before he knew about Mallory’s powers. When he finally went outside one day and saw her tiny hands cupping a small sparrow electrocuted by a power line, and the bird fluttering back to life to shed its charred feathers and then fly somewhat hesitatingly to the nearest tree, he took it as a personal insult, a crime against the natural order of things. But he didn’t take it out on Mallory. It was her mother who was to pay the price for her magical transgression, and who kept paying the price over and over again until Mallory finally did something about it.

Without intending to, without even knowing that she could, she had simply gone to bed one night  _and had a dream_.  

Cordelia rubbed her temple and fixed a more probing gaze than usual on this very strange student of hers.

“So what you’re telling me is that the wish to harm your stepfather manifested not as a premonition of future events but as their actual cause? That you simply wished for it and it happened without even casting any spell?” She leaned back in her chair, exhaling audibly. “That would be extremely strong magic. In fact, it would be practically unheard of.”

“No.” Mallory knew it was going to be hard to explain, even to someone as powerful as her Supreme. “I’m not saying that I dreamed about the future or made it happen in the way I wanted. When I woke up,  _my stepfather had died six months before_. I had to look him up in the phonebook because my mother didn’t know who he was. They’d never met, he’d never moved in with us. It was even worse than that. I even changed my mother's sexuality. She was never interested in men after the dream, or should I say before it.” She could feel her face getting hot, the pinpricks of shame multiplying on her skin. “I simply woke up one morning with two sets of memories, two personal timelines. I remembered how the world used to be. But I also remembered how it was now. At first, both timelines felt equally real to me, and it was really confusing and disorienting for a while, but then my memories of the first timeline started to fade. Or, I should say, they began to feel less and less real.” Her nails sank deeper into the armrests of her chair, boring half-moons into the leather. “I still remembered what my stepfather had done to my mother. I never forgot.”

Cordelia looked at her with a mixture of tenderness and apprehension. It was a while before either of them spoke again. “We’ll figure it out,” the Supreme finally said as she enclosed Mallory’s hands in her own. “All gifts have their uses.”


	2. Antichrist Superstar

Michael peeks through a small rip in the curtain. Thousands of people fill the pews of the underground church, their chattering amplified in the huge cavern. Everyone is excited for his first public appearance, yet something feels off in the air tonight, and it’s not just his nerves.

A born master of ceremonies, LaVey goes out first to warm up the crowd. They clap as the Black Pope tells them that the planet will be cleansed with fire and humanity rebuilt in his Father’s image. The clapping gets louder when LaVey explains how their own bloodlines will be spared as the Apocalypse purges those of the unbelievers. The crowd goes positively wild at the first mention of Michael, the long-awaited chosen one, but when it’s time for Michael to make his entrance on stage, no one can find him.

Enwrapped in his velvet cape, he hides between a spotlight and a potted plant, muttering an invisibility spell under his breath.

From where he stands, Michael can see a little bit of the VIP area in front of the stage. Immediately he hates what he sees. He notes with distaste that there are social hierarchies upon social hierarchies in the church, and he vows to eliminate all such petty distinctions over his thousand-year reign. Anyone who survives the bombs or the locusts, whatever he ends up unleashing, will serve in perfect equality under his boot.

In the New World, there will be no scientists to call Michael “Beelzebub” and tell him to manage his expectations.

There will be no VIP sections where the rich and powerful hide themselves behind those annoying masks of polished chrome.

Most importantly, there will be no witches to foil his plans and burn his loved ones at the stake, and then offer him amnesty, or whatever the fuck Cordelia tried to do that one time. 

A total purge of the light will root out a good section of the dark, it is true, but sacrifices always have to be made. It is not like the planet will be thrown off its axis and jettisoned into space with two less roboticists on it, Michael thinks. And how many members does the Cooperative really need? Fewer than it has now, he decides.  

He is no dummy, the Antichrist. Michael understands perfectly well why four of the Cooperative’s top members phoned him that morning with excuses for their absence tonight. He listened with incredible patience (for him) as they mumbled out their apologies, listing all the urgent business keeping them away from Denver this weekend.

The urgency of any such business is relative, Michael replied in his calmest voice, when the planet on which said business is being conducted is about to become a smoldering cinder.

Truth be told, his voice probably cracked a little when he told a particularly insufferable world leader that the volatile country he planned to plunge into civil war could wait a few days longer.

And to be perfectly honest, his composure likely wavered when he informed the man with the trillion-dollar company that it needed no help being run into the ground, it was managing perfectly fine on its own.  

Michael was probably yelling a little at the pop star who absolutely _had_ to perform on the final leg of her world tour in Australia when he suggested that she consider a last-minute change in venue and move the concert to Hell.

All in all, Michael is very proud of himself for his self-restraint. Retribution will have to wait until after the Apocalypse, and he is surprisingly OK with that. Sure, he still fantasizes about what it would feel like to rip the masks off the faces of every member in the Cooperative, to immobilize each swelled head a magical grip so vicelike it would crush their skulls and—

“Michael, _Michael_.” Ms. Mead is feeling around him blindly. “What are you still doing backstage? And why are you invisible? It’s time to meet your people.”

He swallows. Visions of Satanic grandeur melt away in a flash, and the boy is left quaking in his pointed boots, and twiddling with the ruby clasps of his cape until they threaten to snap and Ms. Mead bats his hand away. 

“I’m not ready!”

“Nonsense, you were born ready. Just remember to pace the sermon exactly how we practiced, taking the time to breathe, and really emphasize the important bits.” She brushes a tear from his chin with her gun hand, the one she unscrews every so often to hail bullets on unbelievers. “Now get out there and dazzle ‘em with your killer sermon.”

Madelyn is pushing something into his hand, three sticks decorated with swirling orange and yellow stripes.

“What the fuck are those?”

“Sugar, for energy. Michael, I want to see you sparkle and shine!”

“What? I don’t need a sugar rush. I just need a few more minutes, until I really start to _feel_ their adoration…”

He’s buying time and they know it. The adoration he craves so much is emanating from the audience in sufficiently large waves, so that is not the problem. So what _is_?

Something deeper in his diabolical instincts has been awakened and is clawing its way upwards to break through the surface of his awareness and sound the claxon of doom.

Michael stops and stares at the curtain. He takes a few shuffling steps forward. The air pressure feels different as a hush descends on the cavern and he swears that he can feel his ears pop. Even as the red lights are dimming and the curtain is opening and Anton LaVey is pushing him onto stage, the thing that he can’t see with his eyes feels bright and uncomfortable on his skin, like a storm blowing from Heaven.

It’s faint, but there’s no mistaking that ethereal stench. Noxiously feminine, it fouls the very air he breathes.

A witch.

No—multiples witches.  

Because they travel in packs. Because wherever there is one, there is always more.

 

******

 

The congregation murmurs when the Antichrist fails to show. A weirdly non-dead Anton LaVey has introduced Michael Langdon and now doesn’t know what to do with his arms as he hovers near the massive curtain, looking behind it every so often.

“I bet their golden boy is having a temper tantrum,” Coco tells Mallory. “Isn’t he supposed to be only, like, six years old?”

Mallory has never seen Michael with her own eyes but knows what to expect from Madison’s frankly leering description of the man. More importantly, based on what the Coven learned from her and Behold's excursion to the Murder House, they know more about their enemy than most of his acolytes. The success of their mission depends on the knowledge that their enemy is not a man at all, but a child trapped inside the body of a man, pulling the strings as he gleefully plots the deaths of seven billion people.  

Something is happening backstage now, and Coco cranes her head to see. She reaches into her bag for the pair of antique opera glasses that she borrowed from Myrtle.

“I can’t believe this. It’s motherfucking Miriam Mead. Here, take a look.”

Mallory grabs the mother-of-pearl handle of the beautiful glasses and looks through the delicate golden barrels. At the edge of the stage is a familiar presence, unmistakable in her black lipstick, black jacket, and black pompadour buzzed on the sides.

“You’re right, that’s totally her. But what is she doing up there, alive? Didn’t we burn her and banish her soul?”

“We most certainly did. He must have found a way to bring her back.”

Mallory considers this for a moment. “No, that would be impossible. Even if he were powerful enough to defy Cordelia’s magic, which I don’t think he is, not yet, he can’t take a soul from Shachath.”

The gruelling banishment spell that Cordelia performed in advance of Mead’s death sentence was only strong enough to stop her soul from descending into Hell. To truly hide it from Michael, Cordelia had to negotiate with Shachath for its temporary safekeeping until the Coven found a way to vanquish him, and, miraculously enough, the Angel of Death had agreed. Mallory wondered if Cordelia had to promise her anything in return, but doubted any ulterior motive from the kindly angel.

“If that’s true, how do you explain Mead being up _there_?” All that vodka in her bloodstream and Coco is still panicking.

“I don’t try to explain it,” Mallory replies calmly. “We don’t know who, or what, that woman is. She could be any number of things. Like a mental projection.”

“I’m not sure, Mal. I saw that evil bitch up close when she fired a bullet into my chest and she looks pretty fucking solid to me. OK, this is getting really scary now.”

“Only now?”

 _Scary_ is not the word that Mallory would use to describe their situation, which has all the makings of a cosmic joke. _Farcical_ is more like it, a conspiratorial farce going all the way up to the highest levels of Being. Theology has never been one of her intellectual passions, but, if she survives this ordeal, she may need to crack open a Catholic apologetic or two to better understand the nature of evil.

Do notions of agency and free choice apply to someone with a soul as inherently corrupted as Michael’s? Does the Antichrist even have a soul to corrupt? And suppose Michael could die like an ordinary man (Mallory dearly hopes this is true), would a divine being like Shachath come to collect it?  

She is still thinking about the Angel of Death when the curtain parts to reveal the man of the hour. The crowd loses its collective mind when Michael steps on the stage, and the chanting of the faithful is deafening in Mallory's ears. She has no choice but to rise to her feet with Coco and clap for the Antichrist.

The jumbotron flickers back to life—until a few moments ago it was transmitting a video of flames on a loop, and then it went black—and Michael’s face comes on in dizzying high-definition.

This is Mallory’s first chance to really look at the Antichrist, up there on the giant screen, this prophesized embodiment of pure darkness. So she looks.

Michael is dressed in wine-colored velvet decorated with rubies and platinum. He is tall and well-built and his movements are fluid and graceful. But all of that is beside the point. The point, Mallory realizes, is the face—the face is the main event—and there is no one thing that makes it so compelling to look at.

Mallory admires the abundance of golden curls that fall around Michael’s forehead and cheeks, how they soften their porcelain planes. She makes a mental note of the surprisingly plush mouth set below a nose that wouldn’t be out of place on a Greek statue, balanced by an equally well-sculpted jawline. But she is most drawn to his hooded blue eyes, which are feline, otherworldly. When Michael looks directly into the camera that's filming him, it is as though he is seeing Mallory straight through the screen, capturing her in the crosshairs of his cerulean gaze.

The sensation is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It simply—is. If she had to describe it, she would call it pure sensation, or weaponized charisma.

Madison was right: this is the kind of beauty you don’t see every day.  This kind of beauty, Mallory thinks, is the 800-pound gorilla in every room.

“Have you caught anything that he’s been saying? Me neither.” Coco is similarly entranced. Michael’s lips are moving and his voice penetrates their ears, but his words have yet to reach either of their brains.

Mallory makes an effort to listen. Michael is describing what will happen during and after the Apocalypse. It is predictably horrible.

“…look, I won’t be chanting in Latin or speaking in tongues. Plain English is perfectly adequate for what I have to say. When the Earth becomes a smoldering ruin and the star named Wormwood falls from the sky and whole mountains are thrown into the sea, it will be you and only you, my dear true believers, who will have a safe place underground to weather out the storm…”  

Michael is good at this. Mallory half-expected to see an insecure boy up on stage, but the man who stands before them is confident, poised, a gifted public speaker.

“…friends, don’t despair! The Earth will soon be ours, reborn in His infernal glory! I will scatter your seeds to the very ends of it, multiplying your issue for generations upon generations to come until they number as all the grains of sand on all the seashores of the ruined world.”

“And after the legions of Hell lay waste to the kingdom of Heaven, our one true Father will cast the false god into the bottomless pit, along with the only son he let die like a spring lamb under the butcher’s cleaver.”

Here Michael lets a single rehearsed tear roll down his cheek. His words are chilling yet Mallory wonders how he plans to accomplish any of what he describes. She glances over to where the members of the Cooperative sit behind their pretentious chrome masks, and decides that they are the true villains of the situation. At least the Antichrist has the excuse of not being human, of being literally born for destruction. The Cooperative is comprised of human beings just like her and Coco, mortal women and men whose descendants will have to live in the Satanic hellscape that Michael is describing so vividly.

“…Let me give you a little inside information about their false god. They accept his bounty of gifts without realizing that these gifts make it impossible to follow the rules he sets for them. He gives them savage instincts! He gives them insatiable appetites! But the gift that they believe to be the most valuable, the one that is actually quite worthless, is the conscience that he hangs around their necks like a bag of bricks.”

“The false god isn’t merciful and loving. He’s a voyeur and a sadist. The false god likes to watch! The heretics flail and fail, all for his divine amusement, and they never want to admit this simple fact, even if they know in their hearts that it’s true.”

“Something wonderful happens to them, and they think, ‘it’s His will.’ Something terrible happens to them, and they say, ‘He moves in mysterious ways.’ But the false god doesn’t ‘move’ in any kind of way, he doesn’t stir from his golden throne room in Heaven and hasn’t done so in centuries. Why? Because the false god is dead! The sycophantic angels that circle his throne, pathetically chanting ‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’ every fucking moment of their pointless eternal lives, are nothing more than flies buzzing around a putrid carcass.”

“But Satan lives! Cast out of Heaven and despised as the fallen angel, Satan is alive in me today, and he is also alive in you, his faithful children who live in a faithless world.” 

The crowd loves this, and Michael loves that they love him. Mallory notices something funny about the Antichrist. Every so often, Michael drops the cool and charismatic façade as something childlike and irrepressible takes him over. At such times, he gives the audience a closed-lipped smile infused with pure joy. A smile, Mallory thinks, that wouldn’t be out of place on the face of a six-year-old entering his own surprise party.

“Satan loves his children even if the false god doesn’t! Give him all your flaws, all your vices, all your appetites. Satan doesn’t want to change a single thing about you. He thinks you’re perfect just as you are.”

A shadow passes over Michael’s face. “But don’t misunderstand my words, dear believers. Satan isn’t only carnal pleasure. He may not require you to follow any of the false god’s draconian rules, but he _does_ want your total love and devotion, and he _does_ demand a kind of purity. Most people confuse evil with their own trivial lusts and perversions, but true evil is as pure as innocence.”

“Umm, Mal?” Coco is nudging her friend in the ribs. “I’m pretty sure that what he just said, the thing about evil being as pure as innocence, is a line from _The Omen III_. This asshole thinks he’s Damien Thorn.”

“Duly noted.” Mallory doesn’t recognize the line, but then again she hasn’t seen as many horror movies as Coco in preparation for their mission.

Michael is still the king of the stage, all sinister elegance as he strolls back and forth across it, his cape streaming behind.

“…and so my fellow Satanists: ask not what your Dark Lord can do for you, but what you can do for your Dark Lord.”

Coco suppresses a laugh. “Now he thinks he’s JFK.”

What comes next is no laughing matter. It is time for the hecatomb, or what the program euphemistically calls a “traditional offering.” Mallory grabs Coco’s hand and squeezes tight, and her friend squeezes back. This is the part of the sermon they were both dreading, and now they are trapped in their seats, a captive audience for ritual murder.

_What was Cordelia thinking?_

Mallory strategizes in her head about how to help the sacrifices after the show. If she is able to recover their remains, even days or weeks after their deaths, there is no reason to think that their bodies can’t be restored and their souls reunited with their bodies. A handful of ashes was all it took for Mallory to revive John Henry as part of her Seven Wonders. She can do the same for Michael’s victims.

The victims in question—two men and one woman—are wheeled out on a wooden platform. Blind-folded and wearing only their underwear, all three are bound to wooden stakes, a bit like how the Coven executes its traitors _._

It takes Mallory a moment to notice that the victims aren’t gagged. Instead, their mouths are missing, sealed with _perpetuum clausis_.

Anton LaVey is back on stage, offering Michael a sacrificial knife, but he waves it away. Whatever he is planning to use for the kill, it is sure to be worse than a quick slice across the jugular.

“Allow me to introduce Kevin, from right here in Denver.” Michael climbs the platform to stand behind the first offering, a young man in green boxers and SpongeBob tattooed on his left bicep.

“Kevin is an epidemiologist. His specialty is working in disaster zones, places stricken by war and extreme weather. We were lucky enough to bag Kevin on his way back home from Syria, where he claimed to be doing ‘god’s work’, but we won’t be needing any more of that in our New World, will we?”

He moves over to the young man in the middle, who stands perfectly still and stoic where the others are shivering.

“This one is named Fazad. Although Fazad is not a professional firefighter, this native New Yorker still managed to save two children from a burning apartment. But who needs another hero of the news cycle?”

Michael strolls to the middle-aged woman on the very end. The camera zooms in on the golden cross around her neck, and gasps are heard from the audience.

“This is the unfortunately named Mary. Mary is a paediatric oncologist at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.” He reaches around Mary’s neck to rip off her necklace from behind, and Mary nearly chokes. “Need I say more?”

He looks pensive for a moment and then breaks out in another one of his boyish smiles.

“Who wants to see a bonfire?”

Right on cue, spontaneous flames kindle at Kevin’s feet and run up his calves and thighs to light up his torso, speeding up his back until they reach his hair. Inwardly screaming, Mallory closes her eyes. She can feel tears welling in her eyes and bile rising up in her throat, but she also knows that she must maintain her incognito.

 _That poor, poor man!_ With his sealed mouth, he can’t even scream.

But something doesn’t feel quite right to Mallory. Something about the twinkling flames that burn this body makes her uneasy in a different way, not just because she’s witnessing an atrocity in real time.

Michael is about to enlighten her along with everyone else. On screen, fire reflects in those depthless twin glaciers he calls eyes. On stage, the fire has spread to the man in the middle, whose stoicism is a distant memory. Fazad squirms in his restraints.

“Normally, when you light people on fire, they simply die. If you were to, say, pour gasoline all over Kevin, Fazad, and Mary here and then flick your cigarette in their general direction, their bodies would expire, releasing their souls to fly all the way up to Heaven.”

He looks straight into the camera and Mallory feels a burning sensation in the pit of her stomach.

“That’s what would happen under normal circumstances. But I’m nothing like normal, so that’s not what’s happening before you tonight.”

 _It can’t be true._ Mallory refuses to believe it. There is no way that Michael is capable.

“Tonight, I’m incinerating the immortal souls of these three heretics along with their mortal coils. The false god won’t be claiming their more souls because they will simply cease to exist. Poof!”

 _He’s really destroying them!_ Mallory looks over at Coco, who is covering her mouth with both hands. Had they known that such magic was even a possibility with Michael, they never would have embarked on this wretched mission to retrieve a strand of his hair. But they are here now, and there must be something that she can do other than sit and watch.

No.

No.

Mallory won’t stand for it.

When the flames progress to Mary, the final victim, some unseen force from deep inside her suddenly ignites, straining to break free of Cordelia’s bonds. Her magic desperately wants to be let out of its cage, but Mallory can’t, or shouldn’t, let it escape. Yet this is beyond her control now. Her legs are working independently of her conscious mind as she rises out of her seat and extends her right arm in the direction of the stage, directing the flow building inside of her in all its incandescent fury.  

Coco tries and fails to pull her back down, but her body is executing its own will now, her brain stripped of its usual command.

When Mallory pulls the trigger of her magic, nothing spectacular happens, and yet the effect is immediate. She is the epicenter of a sudden power, an invisible shock wave that rattles the crowd on all sides. Those in the audience who rose to clap for Michael’s atrocities are tumbling back into their seats, and the stage feels it too. The soul-burning fire that is climbing up Mary’s legs and arms relents for a moment—but only for a moment—before it accelerates to swallow her whole.

Mallory’s power dies in her just as suddenly as it came alive. She tries to flex it again, but the Supreme’s magic is inviolate. The fire refuses to reignite.

_Oh no, what have I done?_

Mallory just exposed herself and Coco, and it is all for nothing.

But Michael doesn’t look horrified. In fact, Michael looks like he expected it.

“Gotcha.”

With a flick of his wrist Mallory is being lifted out of her seat by an invisible force and raised high above the arena. It is a roller-coaster sensation, moving so quickly through the air, and bile rises in her throat once again. Mallory looks below from the vertiginous height—a huge mistake. The force that keeps her airborne gives her free reign of the lower half of her body, and she kicks her legs helplessly. No matter how much she kicks, though, she can’t move an inch from the spot where Michael has her pinned. Her arms are plastered to her sides, bound by some invisible rope, and the same rope coils around her throat now, ready to constrict her airflow on his command.

 _Cordelia, I know that you can’t hear me, but you must help me to figure out a way to break your spell_ , Mallory prays as she tries to access her magic again. But nothing happens. Even if Michael frees her arms, the power that surged out of her so unexpectedly is long gone, safely contained wherever Cordelia banished it.

Everything happens at once. From her bird’s eye view of the arena, Mallory can see that the seating is arranged like the arms of a pentagram, and that thousands of faces are looking up at her. A phalanx of black-suited men with semiautomatic weapons is making its way down the pews to where Coco sits, frozen in terror, and then Coco is being escorted away quietly, no kicking, no fuss—nothing like what Mallory is doing now, caught like a fly in his mental spider’s web.

Commotion spreads through the VIP sections and Mallory understands that her friend has been recognized as the daughter of Mr. Vanderbilt, a member of their tribe if not a member of the Cooperative. Martialling her sense of composure in the face of almost certain death, she hopes to God that Cordelia knows what she is doing and that she has a plan B.

Michael is still watching from the stage, puppeteering her on invisible strings for the amusement of his followers. Mallory’s body pivots again, rearranging itself at his will. Her arms rise from her sides until they are perpendicular to her torso, making a T. Then he flips her over so that her head dangles over the audience, and she finally understands his design.

The Petrine Cross.

_That blaspheming bastard._

In this undignified position Mallory glides slowly, ever so slowly, in the direction of her enemy before she begins her descent. When her head is about a foot off the stage, her hair brushing the floor, she stops, still hovering in the air. 

Michael regards her from above with the infuriating smile of an unshakable superiority. His face looks different from this angle—less soft and cherubic, more calculating and determined. Does she still find him beautiful? Those glacier-blue eyes of his are more intense than she remembers them being on the screen. Their effect is chilling and scorching all at once.   

His gaze never leaving Mallory, Michael steps forward. Mallory feels as if she were being appraised, mentally taken apart piece by valuable piece. What does he think he can get from her? She will never tell him anything about the Coven’s plans, no matter what he threatens her with, and a part of him must know that.  

The Antichrist begins to circle the girl, moving in and out of view. A sharp pain in Mallory’s scalp makes her wince. The man—nay, the child—is stepping on her hair.

“Welcome to my church,” he greets her politely as his expensively shod heel grinds into her auburn tresses. “I hope that you enjoyed your flight, or, at the very least, didn’t find it too uncomfortable.”

“You’re hurting me.”

“Well, that’s rather the point, little witch. Or should I call you Mallory.”

She tries to swallow but finds it impossible in her current position.

“So you know me then.”

Michael says nothing, and Mallory is silently thanking herself for deciding to wear a sensible pair of black pants on her mission. There would be a lot more of her exposed to his gaze if she were wearing one of her usual ankle-dusting dresses and skirts. But there is no time to think about modesty as he flips over again and deposits her at his feet with a thud.

“Yes, my sources tell me that you are very powerful and the star pupil of Cordelia’s academy, the apple of your Miss Supreme’s eye.” He crouches down until their faces are level. “But enlighten me on one peculiar point, Mallory. If your leader finds you so very valuable to her cause, then why is she playing fast and loose with your life? Why does she send you undefended, no, _incapacitated_ , without your magic, into the den of the lion?”

As soon as she regains control of her limbs, Mallory propels herself away from Michael, crawling backwards until she collides with another solid object. Turning around, she sees Mead staring down at her with fury etched on her face, her arm unscrewed to reveal a machine gun with a laser pointer trained on her forehead.

 _So she’s a robot, not a projection, then_. Mallory is glad to know that her earlier deduction was half-correct. Her enemy is still circling her like a smiling vulture, but there is a little triumph in her own eyes now, knowing that Mead’s soul is safe with Shachath.

Michael’s smile wavers a little, but he presses on.    

“I can think of a reason why your Supreme sent you here to die.” Feline eyes narrow as they rake her face for any hint of discomposure. “When a new Supreme begins her ascent to power, the old one must fade.”

He comes a little closer to Mallory now, and Mallory tries to rise but her legs refuse to comply, still shaky from his telekinetic manipulations—and their earlier insubordination when the hidden magic blew out of her.

“It’s not true.” Her Supreme would never do anything like that even if she were fading because of Mallory. Cordelia’s loyalty to her girls is absolute.

Like a cat growing bored of the mouse it’s been batting around, Michael gets up and turns away, facing the audience. They are watching and listening with bated breath.

Whether she wants it or not, Mallory realizes, she is part of his theater now, the sacrilegious passion play in which Michael has cast himself as the Savior figure and her as the moustache-twirling villain. A microphone is being thrust into her hand by another of his accomplices, a long-haired woman roughly Mead’s age.

Mallory thanks the woman and stands experimentally on her weakened legs. She clears her throat. _Are you entertained?_ she wants to shout. Might as well give them a show.

“If you expect me to beg for my life, you're going to be very disappointed,” she tells Michael, making sure to speak from her diaphragm, not her throat.

He looks a little surprised but is ready with his own sally.

“I don’t expect you to beg for your life, Mallory. In fact, I don’t even expect you to die—at least, not for a long time yet. When I finally hunt and kill every other witch on this festering, oozing, _diseased_ excuse for a planet, I expect you to beg me for the mercy of death, knowing that you are the last of your disgusting kind.”  

Cheers erupt from the crowd at this weird bit of posturing. Michael turns to them, soaking up the adoration.  

“I think that you will find our _disgusting kind_ harder to kill than you anticipate, Michael Langdon. Haven’t you even read to the end of that Book of Revelations you so like to quote from? You lose.”

The audience boos and hisses at this bit of villainy, but Mallory leans into the role. Someone in the cheap seats yells “burn the witch!” and the sentiment catches on like wildfire until half the congregation is chanting it.

“What are you waiting for? Burn the witch!”

A hint of annoyance shows on Michael’s deceptively angelic face when he hears their cry. Didn’t he _just_ explain to them why he needs Mallory alive as a witness to the end of the world, the end of her kind? While he appreciates their enthusiasm, the girl will remain alive and unburnt until he decides otherwise.

“You shouldn’t believe everything that you read in a book, little witch. If you are as knowledgeable about that flawed bit of prophecy as you claim, you will remember that it’s your side that starts all the fun. _Then the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to sound them. The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down on the earth—_ ”

“Enough,” Mallory dares to interrupt. She knows it will only enrage him further, but she refuses to listen as the devil’s son quotes scripture.

Michael’s mouth falls open at her impertinence. He looks about ready to lunge. His brow furrows in frustration as he restrains his killer instincts.

“All I’m saying is that your false god, or whoever you believe in, wants the Apocalypse as much, if not more, than we do. And we intend to comply, but only up to a point. There will be no Second Coming. And more importantly, there will be no witches! Your ethereal race will have no place in the New World that I plan to build with the help of my Father.”

Mallory sees her opening and knows that she will pay dearly for what she is about to say, but she can’t help herself. Tears rolls down her cheeks as she glances at the charred platform where Mary, Kevin and Fazad lost both their bodies and souls. She gathers her strength.

“Your father? The one who abandoned you?”  

Dead silence descends on the cavern. It is so quiet that you could hear a feather drop. _He is going to do it now_ , Mallory thinks, bracing herself for the flames. What does a witch’s soul looks like as it burns? She imagines a blinding column of light. But no attack comes. When Mallory reopens her eyes, his face is mere inches away, its beauty distorted by pure rage.

“My Father didn’t abandon me! I talk to him every single day.”

“We both know that’s not true.”

With one fluid motion, Michael rips the microphone out of her hand as he tears off his own headset. Whatever he wants to say to her now is not for the ears of his congregation. Seeking an outlet for his anger but unwilling (for the moment) to take it out on Mallory, he turns to the camera operators near the stage and begins flinging them to the ground one by one, as if they were pestering insects.

It is not enough to kill the transmission and have the screen go black. No. When Michael raises his right hand a second time, the shrill sound of twisting metal echoes throughout the cavern and the giant screen breaks into a million little pieces, raining glass on the faithful.

No telekinesis for Mallory—this time his actual hands wrap around her throat.

“You have some nerve taunting me like that, you pathetic bitch. Who do you think you are? I will capture every last one of your sisters from the Coven and make you watch as they’re tortured until they beg for the sweet release of death, which I will deny. And then when I finally do kill them, it will only be to resurrect them so they can fight in gladiatorial witch battles for my amusement.”

“Go ahead,” Mallory whispers, even as she struggles to breathe. As his hands tighten around her throat, she imagines the bruises that will soon bloom there. “But I know you won’t…”

“Why, because I’m a coward?” Michael laughs. “You wouldn’t be the first person to tell me that.” Coming back to himself, he releases her neck and then brushes his hands on his velvet cape as if mere contact with her skin has dirtied them.   

A strong pair of robotic arms reaches out to separate Mallory from Michael—it’s Mead, who looks outraged on his behalf. Soon more people are climbing the stage to gather in a supportive circle around the Antichrist, who apparently needs comforting after his terrible ordeal. All Mallory gets is the prick of a needle in the back of the neck.

As she collapses to the floor, she catches another glimpse of her enemy, whose fury shows no sign of abating. She has one final thought before she sinks into total oblivion: _Michael, you will never win_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When Michael goes to write his big-boy Satanic speech, I imagined that he’s taking lines from various devil movies (we already know that he watched Omen III for ideas). So I borrowed and reworked a few lines from the following films:
> 
> Rosemary’s Baby (1968)  
> Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981)  
> The Devil’s Advocate (1997)  
> The End of Days (1999)


	3. Captive

Mallory wakes up alone in a room with no windows. Her first thought is of Coco—is her best friend still alive?

The room doesn’t resemble a typical jail cell. Mallory is lying in a four-poster bed with richly embroidered curtains all around it, and to her left there is a night table with a glass of water and a well-thumbed copy of the Satanic Bible. To her right is an elaborately carved wooden wardrobe that matches the ornate style of the bed, and across the room is a another table in the same design. All the wood is painted black, as are all the walls, floor and ceiling. 

Mallory wonders if they’re keeping Coco in a cell just like this one, letting her stew in anticipation of the interrogation that is sure to come. She knows that her friend would never talk or betray the Coven, but she wonders how much torture the heiress could withstand, and if there is any way for her powerful father to intervene in her fate.

She remembers how starving she is when she notices silverware arranged on the far table, a dome of polished silver that covers a platter. When she lifts the dome, she frowns in disappointment. What greets her is nothing she would consider as real food.

A single gelatinous cube quivers on a dinner plate monogrammed with the initials “M.L.”

Mallory’s head still throbs from the sedative and her skin is a little dry, but otherwise she appears to be unhurt. How long has she been asleep? What does Michael intend to do with her and Coco? And how long does he plan to keep them alive? By this time the Coven must know that their mission was a failure, so Cordelia must have some kind of plan. Michael hasn’t provided her with a time piece, and time itself seems to move more slowly down here, wherever “here” is. In fact, her captor hasn’t provided her with much of anything at all besides the wardrobe, which is filled with clothes in various shades of red or black, all tailored to a darker sensibility. Inside, there are leather harnesses with about a million straps, and leather corsets ribbed with what she fears is human bone, and a ton of shapeless velvet which must be robes and capes.

Who decorates a room with broken mirrors? Mallory counts three of them on the walls, two rectangular and one oval. The only other “décor” is a creepy portrait of Aleister Crowley, which is positioned directly across from her bed. The portrait is the first thing she sees when she wakes up, and as she paces back and forth around the room, she swears that the painted eyes are following her.

At first Mallory doesn't notice the ring drawn all around the room with some kind of black powder. If the cell is a perfect square, the ring forms a perfect circle with her bed in the center and all the furniture arranged within its bounds. When she touches the powder, half-expecting it to burn her finger, nothing happens. Recklessly, she puts a bit in her mouth, and finds that it tastes smoky and metallic, like soot mixed with blood.

Mallory attempts to step over the magical line, but an invisible force repels her backwards towards the bed. When she tries to blow the powder away, the line only reforms, as if never disturbed. Her enemies have thought of every precaution. The only door to the room looks to be made of heavy iron and is probably warded to within an inch of its life, and the walls look equally solid. 

The edge of the magic circle breaks at the doorway to the bathroom. A narrow path leads inside, where a smaller ring is drawn around the claw-footed tub. There is another mirror in the bathroom, this one unbroken. The rack of towels near the tub and the kit of the grooming items beside it suggest to Mallory that Michael is planning a visit, and that she is expected to look clean and presentable. Mallory shivers. It is hard to feel grateful for such minor concessions to her basic humanity.

As far as prisons go, this one isn’t so bad, she supposes. Her cell could have been totally bare, or cold, or dirty. She could have woken up shackled to the bed or hung with chains from the ceiling. Yet somehow the very normalcy of the improvised living space is what puts her on edge. She mistrusts the comfortable bed and the antique closet with its weird black clothes. She can't be sure that no poisons lurk in the gelatinous cube presented so artfully under the silver dome. And she suspects that the broken mirrors are enchanted to spy on her, exposing all her doings to Michael’s curious gaze. It’s not that hard to enchant a mirror. Mallory could do it in her sleep.

Speak of the devil. There is a knock on the door and she hears Michael’s voice directly outside. She doesn’t invite him in but he enters the room anyway.

“Mallory! My favorite witch,” he exclaims as if they’ve been friends for years. 

Mallory is disoriented completely. Is this the same man from yesterday who put her in a chokehold on stage, not once but twice? She hardly recognizes the perfectly civilized smile that he wears now, along with a black three-piece suit and purple tie secured with a snake pin—that is, until she notes the sinister edge on that smile, the venomous sweetness dripping from the voice. 

Two lackeys hang behind Michael at what Mallory imagines must be a respectful distance, carrying several items that she mentally catalogs:

A knife.

A snow globe.

A jug of water.

A handheld mirror.

A female corpse.

_One of these things is not like the others._

The lackeys depart and now Mallory is alone with her captor, and still dressed in the same clothes from yesterday, the ratty Slayer t-shirt and clingy black pants. Michael must find her disgusting. In any case, he is still smiling. 

“I come bearing gifts!”

Mallory thinks that this is exactly the kind of thing a cat would say if it knew how to talk, after leaving a headless rodent on its owner’s doorstep. She nearly gags when she looks at the corpse, whose skin is blue and covered in a thin layer of frost. 

“You really are a sick fuck, Michael Langdon, I hope you know that.”

“Why? I haven’t done anything.”

“You’re mentally disturbed for bringing _that_ in. I’ve already seen you kill. You don’t need to keep fucking showing me. I know exactly the kind of monster you are. Please tell me that Coco is okay. If you did something to my friend I swear that I will fucking—”

“Language, Mallory.” Michael’s newfound solicitousness is wearing thin. “I don’t like to hear curse words unless I’m the one saying them. As for the dead body, it’s not to enhance the décor, though this room could use a little—something. It’s just a prop in a little game you and I are going to play.”

“I’m not playing your stupid game. I just want to know what you did to Coco and if she’s alright.”

Michael sighs. 

“Relax, your ‘sister’ witch is alive and well. While you were sleeping so very soundly, she and I had a nice little chat. The little birdie told me everything.” His blue eyes darken like the sky before a storm as he leans into Mallory’s face. “I know all about the Coven’s dumb little plan.” 

He _has_ to be bluffing. But he doesn’t seem too interested in interrogating her, at least not right away. 

“You don’t need to worry about your friend too much. We’re still keeping her in our custody, of course, but your spectacularly failed mission gave us the exact kind of leverage we needed to convince her father to join the Cooperative. My Father owns Mr. Vanderbilt now, which means that I own Mr. Vanderbilt, just like I own you, my little pet witch. But I’m not here to talk about that.” 

Wondering if Coco knows about her father's sacrifice, Mallory watches helplessly as Michael raises his hands to prime his magic, concentrating on the enchanted ring that imprisons her. An invisible force begins to emanate from his fingertips and the powder slowly reforms into a half-circle. A thin black line is all that separates them now, yet this line is the gulf between freedom and captivity. Michael takes a tentative step into her space and quickly withdraws, motioning for her to do the same. Yet when Mallory tries to step over the line, she is thrown backwards by strong magic.

Michael laughs. Crossing back into her space uninvited, he tries to grab hold of her hand. Instinctively, she recoils from his touch, and he looks a little annoyed.

“Our game won’t work unless you agree to behave. Hold still. I need to perform a spell.”

When he approaches her again, Mallory runs all the way to other side of the room where she crouches behind the four-poster bed. Michael retreats to the edge of the line and decides to try a different tactic.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Mallory. In fact, I’m going to help you. Cordelia believes that the spell that binds your magic is unbreakable by anyone but her, but she is half-wrong. If you allow me to help you, I can restore your magic, if only temporarily and only inside this perimeter.” He watches as she emerges from behind the bed, still mistrustful of his intentions, and more than a little incredulous at his claim. “But I need to know that you won’t try to fight back.”

Mallory regards him with narrowed eyes. He doesn’t _look_ like he is lying right now, and if he really wanted to harm her, he could have done so while she slept. Still, there has to be some ulterior motive.

“Why are you doing this? And what kind of game are we playing? I’m telling you for the last time that I will _never_ betray the Coven, no matter what you do to me.”

“This is not an interrogation. I need you to prove a point.”

Mallory sighs. There is no use defying him. Putting on her bravest front, she walks over to Michael and raises herself up to her full height, disappointed (but also a little thrilled, if she is being honest) to see that he still towers over her. She tries her best to hold still as he puts his hands on her shoulders. The weight of those hands is oddly calming, and Mallory has been starved of her God-given magic for so long that even the dark power that radiates off the Antichrist feels terrifying and intoxicating in equal measure.

She has felt this power before when they were on stage, sparring in front of thousands, but it was nothing like this. She surrenders to the sensation despite her better judgment. Through the flimsy cotton of her shirt, Michael’s hands are practically burning her skin, and even if he weren’t touching her, his sheer proximity would send an electrical frisson up her spine.

Leaning into his furnace-like warmth, Mallory avoids looking into his eyes for fear of being chilled by his gaze and returned to reality.  

“Why so tense? This won’t hurt, but it may feel a little weird. I’m going to reach inside you to find the source of your magic so that I can unblock it. At least for a while.”

As soon as Michael utters those words, she feels their meaning internally. He wasn’t kidding about reaching inside of her. An unimaginable power courses out of his fingertips and into her willowy frame as he steadies her through the onslaught of power. It feels like a velvety darkness is caressing every inch of her skin and seeking entry through every available pore, and once it penetrates her body it spreads like wildfire through her viscera, lighting up every nerve ending in its path.

When she opens her mouth to scream, darkness fills it, just as it fills her nostrils and her ears and— 

_What if the change is irreversible? What if it takes the place of her innate light?  
_

Oddly, risk is the furthest thing from Mallory’s mind as she imagines a shimmering oil slick being spilled into the virgin sea of her soul. Taken over by the viscous substance, the sea shimmers black in its own right, gathering into violent, shipwrecking waves as it stirs up sleeping creatures from the depths, creatures with haunted eyes and razor-sharp teeth—

No, a mere sea isn’t big enough of a metaphor to capture this experience, Mallory decides. She needs something cosmic to describe what it feels like as Michael feels around inside her mystically, looking for the spell that blocks her magic.

A black hole—that is how she would describe this power of corruption that he so naturally wields. Feeling more invaded than she ever thought possible, Mallory is also more exhilarated and alive, and she marvels at the contradiction. A black hole may be invisible to the eye, but it is still the brightest object in the sky. Why? Because it swallowed up all the bright objects in its orbit.    

Cordelia once told Mallory that she saw humanity in Michael. He had been down on his knees then, mourning the charred remains of Ms. Mead, and she had extended him a welcoming hand. But nothing is that simple.

Standing at the event horizon of an infinite evil that threatens to swallow her whole, Mallory knows the truth. Even if there _is_ some light in Michael’s soul, none can escape the gravity well of Father’s darkness. 

Mallory is on the verge of panicking when it happens, the shift in the balance of power. 

Just as she feels herself going over the edge, about to be crushed into nothing by the pull of Michael’s gravity, there is a change in the air. Michael has found the source of her magic and is working to undo the mystical knot, and now the darkness that fills Mallory has a rival. As her magic returns to her body, her enemy has no choice but to release her shoulders and fall to his knees. He winces in pain as he wrestles with something unseen, and the unseen thing seems to be winning. When he begs her to stop, his voice is small and weak. Blinding and pitiless, Mallory’s power feels like the sunshine that she is being deprived of underground.

“What the fuck was that? Some dirty witch’s trick?” 

Michael has backed away from her over the line, panting a little as he catches his breath. His blue eyes are wide. His mouth gapes open in wonder. A riot of curls, his blonde hair is in disarray. Mallory is shocked to realize that he feels the same mix of emotions as her: terrified and excited at once by something new and exotic.

“You are more powerful than Cordelia realizes, and a lot more dangerous. No wonder your Supreme wants you dead.”

Mallory rolls her eyes. And they were doing so well. Now that her power is back, even if only for a short while, she feels some semblance of hope. _She can beat him._

“Let’s just get on with the game.”

“Good. I’m glad to see that you’ve come to your senses.”

Michael pulls the table towards the center of the room so that its legs straddle the magical line. He pulls up two chairs for them and commands her to sit. On the table are the knife, the snow globe, the jug of water, and the handheld mirror. The corpse remains on the floor, and Mallory is revolted to notice that the dead woman—no, girl, possibly her exact age—has begun to defrost. A large dagger is lodged in her chest. 

“It’s time to begin, and we don’t have a lot of time. We only have about twenty minutes and then your magic goes back into hiding. I want to test how powerful you are before Cordelia’s ban returns with a vengeance. Now, it’s important that you tell me the truth: have you performed the Seven Wonders?”

Mallory thinks for a moment. She remembers what it felt like as John Henry’s body came together again from a pile of ash under her hands, reforming tissue by tissue and bone by bone.

“No, I never took the test. Cordelia didn't think we were ready.”

“Don’t lie to me, Mallory, it won’t help you.” The cruel glint returning to his eyes, Michael is determined to have his way. “I _will_ test your so-called power, and you _will_ show me what I need to see.” He points at the corpse on the ground. “If that thing bothers you so much, we can start with the _Vitalum Vitalis_.” 

The murky puddle around the thawing body is growing bigger by the minute. Now there is a definite smell. If Mallory keeps refusing to do what he asks, the perfume of death will seep into her pillows and bedspread.

“You really are a monster among monsters.” She tries and fails to suppress the tsunami of anger gathering in her chest. “I can only imagine how terrified that poor girl must have been when you freaks sacrificed her at the—”               

“I didn’t harm a hair on this girl’s head,” Michael interrupts, looking insulted by her insinuation. “She took her own life on the day that I arrived here.” He waits for her to look impressed.

“Why? Because you tormented her into killing herself? Tell me the reason.”

“I’ll tell you the best reason there is. The intensity of her devotion to me is what inspired her to drive that dagger into her own heart. She did it to gain my approval. All I did was glance at her once.” 

Bizarrely enough, Mallory believes him. But immediately, she wonders if Michael is preening for her benefit now, peacocking for the admiration that he believes to be his natural due. Here is a model of devotion for her to emulate, he is probably thinking—though perhaps not to the same extreme degree as the unfortunate girl. 

“I’m resurrecting that girl, Michael, and that’s my final word on that.”  When he doesn’t respond immediately, Mallory begins to have doubts. “Unless you’re lying about the suicide. Doesn’t the devil always lie?”

“Wrong on both counts. For one, I’m not the actual devil, only his humble earthly representative, and two, I never lie. You and I don’t have that in common.”

“Oh, I’m sure you never lie, Michael.” Mallory is also sure that he doesn’t appreciate her sarcasm. “I’m sure you’re practically a Guardian of Veracity in the Vernacular. But if you _are_ telling the truth about the girl, it’s a simple matter. Revive Ophelia yourself.”

“Her name isn’t Ophelia, it’s Vanessa. And Vanessa will remain a moldering corpse until _you_ decide to show me exactly what I want to see. What are you so afraid of, Mallory?” He taunts. “That you impressed me with that cheap and flashy show of power just then? Don’t be silly. It’s still only witchcraft.”

“I _did_ impress you,” Mallory replies, feeling oddly defiant. “You said it yourself. Allegedly, it’s what put a target on my back with the Coven, remember?”   

Patience doesn’t come naturally to Michael. Hate flashes in his cerulean eyes, which bore into her soul like diamond drill bits.  

“If you don’t want to do _Vitalum_ right away, we’ll have to start with scrying.” 

He picks up the mirror on the table and holds it up to her face a little aggressively. Mallory catches a glimpse of herself and wishes she hadn’t. Not only are there dark circles under her eyes to offset the awful pallor of her skin, but her hair is a rat’s nest.     

“While you were incapacitated, I snuck in here and hid a small object in the room. No, don’t frown at me, little witch. This is my kingdom and I have every right to go where I please. You’re conveniently forgetting that I own you." He looks down his nose at her. "Scrying involves the ability to extract information from a reflective surface. Look into this mirror and tell me where I hid the object. For extra credit, reach into the mirror and produce it.”

This is unexpected. The Trial of Divination is a standard part of the Seven Wonders test at Miss Robichaux’s, where they do it with rocks from the garden or jewels from Myrtle’s collection. But as far as Mallory knows, none of her sisters have ever used a mirror to divine the location of a hidden object, let alone retrieve it. She doesn’t have the beginning of a clue how to do that.

The young witch is now faced with a choice. She can attempt Michael’s scrying test and fail, giving her enemy the satisfaction of besting her in the magical arena. This is the likeliest outcome anyway, as Mallory recognizes the superiority of his powers, given their hellish origin. The other option is to pass the test and confirm Michael’s suspicions about her being a rising Supreme to rival Cordelia’s short-lived dominion. Michael may kill her if she passes. He may kill her if she fails. There is no way to know which outcome is preferable.

“I’ll perform your test,” she finally relents. All she gets for her trouble is a shark-like grin.

Taking a deep breath, she begins by clearing her mind of anything unrelated to the mirror he holds up in front of her. Reducing her awareness to the wavelength of pure sensation, she can feel that infernal heat rolling off his body again, but she tries to stay focused on the task at hand. This is harder than anything she has ever attempted.

Mallory closes her eyes but the image of the room as reflected in the mirror remains in view. Like a roll of celluloid film whirring through a projector, the room flickers on the screen of her eyelids. Its interior architecture is revealed to her plainly. She can see, no, _feel_ , the whereabouts of all the objects in her immediate vicinity. She knows where each thing is located and what other things it contains, but she still can’t find what she is looking for, at least not at first. As Mallory wills her mind to penetrate deeper into her environs, a single object begins to assert itself finally, calling out for singular attention. Something is hidden in the wardrobe, buried under a pile of extra blankets.

Mallory’s eyes are still closed as she makes like Alice and passes her right hand through the looking glass to touch the carved wooden knob.

“Is it OK if I turn around and look? Or is it inadvisable, like meeting your doppelganger or traveling back in time and conceiving your own grandmother?”

When Michael says nothing to this bit of foolishness, Mallory turns around and looks anyway. On the other side of the room, her own disembodied hand is opening the wardrobe and reaching inside for the small object under the blankets. When she withdraws it from the mirror, she is left holding a Rubik’s cube.

“Excellent! I knew you could do it.” Michael looks pleased as punch, and Mallory wonders what that means exactly. “Now comes part two of the test.”

“You didn’t say there would a part two.” Of course there was always going to be a part two.

“Don’t worry, Mallory, it’s so simple that even a witch can do it. Let’s see how fast you can solve the puzzle.”

Mallory looks down at the Rubik’s cube. Oh no. She is simply no good at this kind of game because her brain is too disorganized to think in logical steps (and Michael’s is?). Intuition has always been the more dependable guide, and so she turns to it now, scanning the bright-colored squares for any semblance of pattern. Soon enough the cube begins to rotate in her hands, and after about a minute of playing with the toy, unfamiliar knowledge is pouring into her mind from some mysterious place. This, she supposes, is a kind of Divination.

_First comes the white cross, then the white corners, after that the middle layer, and after that the yellow face, then the yellow corners and edges…._

At the very moment that Mallory solves the Rubik’s cube and proffers it to Michael on the palm of her hand, she has a vision of a much younger Michael doing the same  thing with someone else—a kind-looking man in his early fifties. The vision flashes for only a second, but it is enough to reveal a domestic environment that Mallory instantly knows is the Murder House. The ghostly man, who must be Ben Harmon, is smiling at the living boy at his feet, ruffling his mop-top and praising his cleverness.

The strangest thing about the vision is how gentle the boy looks in his moment of triumph, how innocent and eager to show his father figure the fruit of his mental labor. Mallory is amazed at how different this younger version of Michael is compared to the cold and princely man that sits across from her today. If she ever gets back to the Coven, she vows to get the full story from Madison.

The older Michael rips the toy from her hands as he mutters something inaudible under his breath.   

“Mallory, if you continue to perform in this way, I may have to revise my low opinion of witches—well, _some_ witches anyway. But the test isn’t done yet.”

He shoves the toy back in her direction with unmistakable glee and their fingers spark on contact. Mallory shivers a little and sees that Michael is similarly affected, but she has no time to analyze it because something is happening to Rubik’s cube. Its layers are shifting again, rotating of their own volition, realigning with sinister clicks. 

The cube is no longer a cube, she is horrified to learn. Mallory drops it like a hot potato and tries to edge away from the table, but Michael holds her chair in place with his mind. He watches her like a man hypnotized as she recoils from the no-longer-cube that is spinning and growing even more sides, pulsating in every color of the rainbow.

Infernal geometry! The mathematics of evil! As if Mallory needed another phobia to add to her already extensive list.

When the possessed puzzle finally stops spinning on the table, it splits open and vanishes into the air, releasing a large snake. The thing looks extremely venomous and angry as it slithers and hisses in her general direction.

Michael is still watching with evident amusement. He has no intention to help. “Quick, Mallory, grab the knife! Kill the viper before she kills you.”

“ _That’s_ what the knife is for, you idiot? Not for any kind of blood-letting ritual?”

Even as she’s trying to run from the snake, Mallory has questions. She knows that she should feel even more terrified than she does, but the rage is overwhelming. She concentrates her furious will on the chair and it finally moves from the spot where Michael has frozen it. Who needs a knife if her magic is back?

“I’m not killing the snake,” she shouts. “It’s a living creature like you and me! Take it outside and release it!” She uses her mind to air-lift the creature from the table, watching it writhe and thrash around.

Michael grimaces at the absurdity of these words and the snake bursts into flames.

_What did she think would happen?_

Mallory is exhausted when she submits to the next round of testing. Maybe complying with Michael’s wishes will make him go away quicker, and when he does go away, maybe he will take the dead girl with him.

The next test is another oldie-but-goodie from the Warlock Council: _Stiricidium_. 

Michael indicates the jug of water on the table and commands her to alter the climactic conditions of the room, turning water into snow. There’s a slight difference, however, he warns as he shakes up the snow globe, holding the transparent ornament up to her face. Inside, a miniature red village is being assailed by a flurry of fake snowflakes.

When he flips over the snow globe so the village is on top, Mallory realizes that he wants her to make it snow upside down. OK, no biggie. But even when she miraculously succeeds in executing that weird bit of magic to perfection, sending powerful snow flurries all the way to the ceiling where they collect and restructure into icicles, Michael is still unsatisfied. There really is no pleasing him. He really wants to see her do the _Vitalum_.   

Fine. 

Together they walk over to the corpse, which glistens with a new layer of ice. Trying not to think about what she is doing too much, Mallory lowers herself to the floor as Michael lords over her from above. Rosy lips hovering about an inch above the girl’s blue ones, she begins to blow a steady gust of air into Vanessa’s frozen lungs, and then extends her hands over the torso to radiate her magic before moving down her arms to her legs. She smiles as the warm color returns to the stirring flesh.

Her twenty minutes is up. That’s the last of her magic for now, expended on the resurrection spell. At least she used it well.

“Very nicely done. You’ve even de-aged her a few years. I think I’m impressed.”

Vanessa awakes with a start, coughing up something black and congealed. When she goes to touch the place in her chest where the dagger was buried to the hilt, there is only smooth skin. Her eyes scan the room with lightning quickness, passing over Mallory completely to alight on Michael, whom she imagines has brought her back from the dead.

“My King!” she exclaims as she prostrates herself at his feet, crawling forward to kiss his Gucci shoes. Michael grimaces and tries to flee, but Vanessa is persistent. “I was ready to burn for all Eternity in the loving embrace of the Primordial One, the Most Foul, the Ancient Serpent—your Father! But I’ve been saved by the Son! That means you have plans for me yet.” She rises and virtually swoons into Michael’s arms as he takes her hand with evident hesitation. “Command me to dirty deeds, oh Unholiest One! I am yours in this life and the next. Nema!”

Looking askance at the torn and sodden dress that clings to Vanessa’s battered body in all the wrong ways, Michael issues his first command.

“Uh, go to Mallory’s closet and pick out a dress, any dress. Then, um, go into the bathroom and clean yourself up a bit so I have something pleasing to look at.” 

Vanessa looks crestfallen for a moment, then perks herself back up. “Yes! Vanity, the sin of pride! I will be right back, my Lord, and my appearance is sure to please you.”

Mallory watches in disbelief as the girl walks over to “her” wardrobe and picks out a ridiculously revealing black dress with a human-bone corset. Vanessa pairs this with a towering pair of black heels that Mallory didn’t even know were in there.   

“You never cease to disgust me, Michael Langdon. I’m literally speechless. I don’t know what to say to you anymore.”

“You could start by saying ‘thank you’ that I let you to feel like your real self again, you rude cunt, even just for a little while. There may be more where that came from…”

“No.” Mallory is firm on this point. “I’m not doing any more tests for your amusement, or research, or spank bank, or whatever you need it for. Next time I feel my power, it will be because Cordelia has lifted her spell and I am free.”

Michael chuckles at the sheer absurdity of that statement as he watches the door of the bathroom open to reveal the new and improved Vanessa. The corset is crushing her middle and the perilous stilettos nearly make her fall, but her game face is on. She finally deigns to notice Mallory on her way to find a mirror, and she doesn’t even address her directly.

“And what is _she_ going to wear?” she asks Michael as she checks out her rival. “OK, nevermind, whatever floats your boat. Where do you want us? On the bed?”

“Uh, no, that won’t be necessary, there is other business I need you to attend to,” Michael replies curtly. 

Vanessa finds one of the broken mirrors and twirls in place, admiring her splintered reflection. She looks down at her cleavage in frustration, pushing her breasts closer together. “You know what they say: the lower the neckline, the closer to Hell.”

 

*****

 

Michael tries hard not to cringe, but it’s stronger than he is. He has nothing against Vanessa personally and certainly he appreciates her selfless devotion to the cause, but he simply has no interest in maintaining the appearance of interest. The whole resurrection thing was solely for Mallory’s benefit, a clever way to kill two birds with one stone. As expected, Mallory is simply too dumb to see it, the plain truth of the matter.  

After much trying, he finally succeeds in attaching Vanessa to a group of idle Satanists and losing them all in the labyrinthine corridors of the underground complex. Free at last, he goes straight to what he has come to think of his office. From the privacy of this room, it is an easy matter to look in on Mallory.

Michael was very amused to hear her accuse him of spying on her through the broken mirrors, and she refused to believe him when he explained that those were purely for decoration. The truth is that the portrait of Aleister Crowley is enchanted for that nefarious purpose. On the wall in his “office” hangs an identical copy to the painting in Mallory’s room. Whenever he feels the urge to spy, all he has to do is take the copy off the wall and turn it over, aligning his eyes with the painted ones, and immediately he has the perfect view of her prison. 

This time, his baffling little witch lies prone on her bed, looking truly despondent, at the end of her rope. Copious tears flow into her bedspread, and occasionally she beats her furious little fists into her pillows. She must be wondering what she did in this life to deserve being trapped in what she probably thinks of as the waiting room to Hell.

Is she beautiful or not beautiful? Michael berates himself for even asking that question. What does it matter to his Father if Mallory is beautiful or not beautiful? No part of the plan hinges on _that_ , and even if some part of it did, Michael could refashion Mallory into whatever strikes his fancy, rearranging flesh, bone and sinew to conform to his exact aesthetic specifications.

And what are those specifications, exactly? What does Michael really like, if he is honest with himself? The truth is that he doesn’t really know, but he doesn’t _dislike_ what he sees through the peep holes in the Crowley portrait, that much is certain.

Mallory is still blubbering into her pillow, still praying to the false god, still hoping that Cordelia will come and save her. Michael can’t help it—it makes him so hard! All those desperate tears, that sweet despair, that hopeless hope. Above all what he savors is the innocence that he plans to corrupt beyond all repair.

Michael’s left hand drifts to the front of his pants, making quick work of the zipper. His right hand is the one he spits into as he examines every inch of Mallory that he can see from Crowley's vantage point on the wall. Sure, it’s a little awkward keeping the portrait in place as he pulls down his pants and pulls out his cock, giving it a few lazy strokes to start with. But the vista is inspiring.

Mallory is a slip of a thing, he realizes. She is naturally built kind of small, with angular shoulders and bony arms that could use a bit more muscle tone, but her hair is surprisingly luxuriant as it falls over her crying face. Michael sighs, deeply gratified by her emotional pain. He strokes himself a little bit faster now, but not so fast that he overstimulates his senses. 

The imprisoned girl is up from her bed and walking around. Mallory lifts up the silver platter and dish on the table and hurls them across the room with all her strength. Michael makes a pleasant discovery: if her sorrow makes him hot, her fury makes him hotter!

He lets out a decadent moan as he tightens the grip on his cock, trying to picture what Cordelia and the rest of her Coven are doing. Soon they will be running around Miss Robichaux’s like the headless chickens they are, wailing to the heavens over Mallory and Coco’s disappearance, and cursing Michael for being so damn powerful (and good-looking).

There is nothing those bitches can do to get their friends back—nothing!

The knowledge of his absolute dominance over the Coven spurs Michael closer to the finish line as his strokes pick up some real speed. He is panting a little as Mallory stops throwing objects around her room and settles down on the floor, shedding even more of those delicious tears into her flimsy nightshirt. He is using his whole hand now, anticipating the sweet release that it will bring—correction, that _she_ will bring. He imagines what it would feel like to grab a fistful of Mallory's hair and force her face down on his cock despite her objections, and how he would disregard the tears that never stop flowing down her cheeks and chin. The picture is so vivid that it nearly finishes him right then and there. Michael can’t suppress a lustful groan as he imagines the rising Supreme wrapping her rosy lips around his engorged member. In his mind’s eye he is fucking her mouth with abandon, really losing himself down her throat as she looks up at him with those hyper-expressive, orphan-like eyes.  

Oh, but he is capable of so much more than the brutality that is his birth right. Michael would comfort Mallory after the act, producing the softest silken handkerchief to dry her tear-stained face. He would whisper sweet nothings into her ear, telling her how sorry he was about all the pain and inconvenience. He would stroke her messy hair and kiss her temple and and promise to return her back to the Coven in one piece (he would lie).

 _Uh oh._

When Michael hears someone enter the room a fraction of a second too late, a few things happen at once. As he moves to cover his nether regions with his cape, he lets out a strangled cry unbefitting the son of Satan. 

“Don’t you ever knock? I’m a little busy right now…”

To his absolute horror, he is unable to stop the peephole portrait of Crowley from sliding to the floor, where the fucking thing lands Aleister-side up.  

Ms. Mead stands there like a deer in the headlights, unsure how to react. With her 240 terabytes of memory, there is no unseeing what she’s seen today.

“I’ll come back when you’re decent,” is all she says as she backs out of the room and closes the door.  

*****

At Kineros Robotics, Mutt rubs his eyes and blinks at the live camera feed coming from robo-Mead’s sensory unit. 

“Bro, what the fuck did I just see?” 

“What did it look like? Our boy was jerking off to a portrait of Aleister Crowley. There’s no accounting for taste.”

“I know that but, _bro_. He’s, like, the _Antichrist_. That’s the definition of spoiled for choice! Ryan Reynolds would service him 24/7 if he only asked.”

Jeff thinks for a moment. The last thing they need is more weird bullshit from Michael, who is already driving them up the wall with his demands for an “authentic” Apocalypse. 

“Maybe he doesn’t want Ryan Reynolds, dude. Maybe he’s only turned on by some deeply Satanic shit, like long-dead occultists or something.”

Mutt seems worried.

“I don’t know. He’s been spending an awful lot of time in the basement with that witch girl he kidnapped, the one who tore up his shit at the sermon. Hey, did you manage to get a look at her? Maybe we shouldn’t have missed his big speech. I bet he took major offense to that, bro.”

“If you’re really so curious about the witch, the Battle-Ax Miriam Mead 2.0 can pay her a visit.”

“No, he only wants Madelyn to go down there. As if that lady isn’t whacked as fuck.”

Mutt finds a bit of spilled cocaine from earlier and proceeds to snort it directly off his shirt.

“Bro, I don’t understand why we can’t put Roxy and Cricket in Outpost 9. I mean they _are_ kind of a double act, if you know what I mean.”

“Look, it’s bad enough that we’re saving _one_ of your favorite hookers from the Apocalypse. You can’t be getting too greedy.”

Mutt looks deflated. “Fine, I’ll take Cricket.”

Jeff looks at his friend and colleague with thinly veiled disgust, and then remembers that he has something to show him.

“Hey, did you see the drawing he sent us?”

“What drawing?”

Jeff goes to retrieve it from the top-secret storage room where they keep their schematics.

“It came this morning by fourth-class mail. Cheap motherfucker.”

Mutt looks impressed.

“Woah, Michael drew that? It’s pretty good for a six-year-old.”

“Take a good look and tell me what you see.”

“Is that a trick question? I see a fiery comet streaking across the sky, about to land in a dark sea, or lake. It’s a nuclear missile?”

“That’s no missile.” Jeff taps the paper for emphasis. “That’s Wormwood, an evil star. Michael said he wants that instead of a nuclear holocaust.”

“Bro. What the fuck is an evil star, even? And how do we give him one?”

“We don’t. Our little lost Antichrist wants to do it himself. Michael plans to rain stellar motherfucking fire upon this skidmark of a planet like it’s going out of style.”

“Woah. He’s more fucked than I thought.”

“Yeah, no kidding. But I have a better idea. Let’s just launch Dead Hand ourselves and tell him that Russian hackers got into the bombs or something, or that daddy Satan sent the virus personally. Michael won’t know the lie.”

“I don’t know about that, bro, what if he does?”

“Then we can wish upon an evil star that he doesn’t roast our insubordinate asses.”

*****

An elegant redheaded woman dressed in purple from head to toe stands outside the laboratory where her employers have been arguing for what feels like an hour, watching their primate-like antics through the glass. It depresses her to think that the world is being run by the likes of Mutt and Jeff, and she wonders, not for the first time that day, how these absolute man-babies could become billionaires before the age of thirty without putting in any real work. 

Another bowl of white is in order, thinks Wilhemina Venable as she leans on her cane. Maybe this time she can poison it.

 


	4. On the Road

For all Mallory knows, the world has ended already.

How long has it been since Michael came to test her abilities? Four, five days? With nothing to do, hours feel like days and days feel like weeks. Mallory’s only reading material is the Satanic Bible, a book she has practically memorized cover to cover. Mostly she spends her time worrying about Coco and wondering when Cordelia will ride to their rescue.

Mallory is grateful for the small gains. In the last few days, she has stopped throwing silverware around the room. She no longer falls asleep in the tub, as if daring her body to drown while her mind is occupied elsewhere. She no longer starves herself. She no longer cries into her pillow. She is serene when she needs to be. The great flood of her misery has run dry.

At night everything changes.

Dreams have terrified Mallory ever since she dreamed her stepfather out of existence, but these new ones are different. For one, Michael appears in them with a certain regularity, mostly as a kind of an inchoate darkness, a black fog that creeps under her door and into her bed. He assails her from all directions until she opens her mouth to scream and the darkness fills her, and then the dream ends. Other times he comes in his corporeal form, all soft curls and plush lips and baby blue eyes. These are much worse in a way, because at least the darkness was honest. The beauty is a ruse, a mask. 

One night she awakes from a dream, convinced that someone is in her cell. Memories of indescribable pleasures and pains linger in her mind, and her nightshirt is soaked right through. So are her panties.

In the dream, Mallory opened her thighs to an indistinct presence that resolved itself into Michael, and she could swear that he is here with her now, slinking around the room like a shadow.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

He doesn’t answer. She tiptoes out of her bed to investigate.

Mallory burns in shame as she remembers that industrious mouth working to meet every thrust of her hips in the dream, and also how her fingers were threaded in his silky hair, as if spurring him to greater feats of oral skill. But her real shame lies in how she felt afterwards, floating on a cloud of post-orgasmic bliss without a care in the world.

“Michael? Is that you?” She squints at the familiar form resolving out of the darkness. But he won't give her the satisfaction.

All the lights in the room switch on at once, disorienting her completely. When she regains her sight, there Michael stands, smiling like a devil child on Winter Solstice morning. He has a suitcase in one hand and a picnic basket in the other. Dressed in a black turtleneck and matching black pants, he looks more casual than in his warlock attire.

“It’s your lucky day today, Mallory, because we’re going on a road trip to New Orleans. Your Supreme has negotiated your release.”

“You’re taking me back to the Coven?” She can hardly believe her good luck.

“Something like that. But don’t get _too_ excited. Your safe delivery to Cordelia depends entirely on whether she gives me what I want.”

“And what do you want?”

“That’s classified!”

Mallory thinks for a moment. What can Cordelia possibly have that Michael wants? More importantly, what would her Supreme consent to give? Understanding suddenly dawns on her.

Oh.

_Oh._

“It’s Mead’s soul, isn’t it?”

The smile melts off his face in an instant. “Really, Mallory, do you ever miss a beat? It’s so annoying. Anyway, hurry up and pack your bags and eat your breakfast because I want to hit the road in half an hour. We’re headed into the mountains.”

“The mountains? I thought we were going to New Orleans. Wait, why aren’t we flying there? We’re literally under an airport.” The serpentine way in which Michael’s thoughts move is endlessly confusing and endlessly fascinating to Mallory.

“We’re driving to the mountains because there’s a shortcut that I’ve been meaning to try. Something better, and safer, than long-range transmutation. Not to mention, more fun!”

“Let me get this straight. You negotiated with your enemy for something you desperately want and she agreed to give you, and now you’re on your way to seal the deal, but first, you want to have fun?”

“Look, once the outposts are up and running, I’ll need a quick and reliable way to travel—” Michael quickly puts a finger to his lips, as if he’s already said too much. “—but I’m getting ahead of myself. You don’t need to understand the plan, Mallory, just follow it. Now stop dillydallying and start packing.”

As Mallory dresses and packs for the trip, she wonders about the terms of their exchange. Is Mead’s soul even Cordelia’s to give anymore, now that she’s in the custody of Shachath? The kindly Angel of Death could decide to withhold it until Michael is vanquished and his Apocalypse put on indefinite hold. If that happens, then Michael will leave empty-handed, and Mallory dreads to think of the consequences to the Coven.

She doesn’t want to admit that she hopes a little for his sake that the soul is exchangeable. There is something oddly touching about Michael’s relationship with Mead, the closest thing he ever had to a mother.

Mallory is surprised that she doesn’t spare more of a thought for her own mother, who must be going out of her mind as she frantically searches for a daughter that could be alive or dead.

What is going on with her lately? Has she gone stark raving mad? Stockholm Syndrome must be one hell of a drug. Mallory should be busy hating Michael and plotting the finer points of his demise, not empathizing with her captor because he had a shitty childhood.

He transmutes her away from her cell without any forewarning. _Typical._ The ride through interdimensional space always makes her queasy, but this one is especially bumpy. She nearly hurls when her feet materialize on the pavement.

Outside, it is a gorgeous spring morning. The sun is shining, not a cloud in the sky. The birds are singing. A soft breeze tickles her neck. The world is intact. Mallory nearly cries.

Michael is waiting in the parking lot, leaning on the hood of a red convertible with a Baphomet sticker on the front and flame decals in the back.

With Satan’s problem child at the wheel and Mallory riding shotgun, the drive is as tense as expected. Michael is an anxious driver who keeps glowering at any fellow driver who dares to pass them on the highway, and Mallory doesn’t like the way his eyes keep daringt over to the rear-view mirror, as if he is _this_ close to incinerating every other car on the road. She imagines flaming wreckage on the five o-clock news. Would he make it look like an accident?

When the other cars start to thin around them on the climb into the snow-capped Rockies, she breathes a sign of relief.

“Michael, can I ask you a favor?”

“ _May_ I…”

“May I ask you a favor?”

“Sure, anything.”

“Let’s have a normal conversation, just this once. I’ll pretend that you’re not the Antichrist. You’ll pretend that I’m not the rising Supreme. Just a civilized exchange of words. Is that a possibility, do you think?”

He nods in assent. Yes, he can pretend to be normal if she can. The first thing he asks is if she knows a witch named Dinah Stevens.

“The Voodoo Queen? I know _of_ her. She doesn’t get along with the Coven, likely because of what happened with Cordelia’s ex-husband.” Michael nods, as if he knows the whole sordid business. “My impression of Dinah is that she’s terribly ruthless and pragmatic and would happily slit your throat if it would give her a leg up. Listen, if you’re conspiring with Dinah against the—”

“Really, Mallory, you’re more likely to conspire with Dinah against _me_.” He looks saddened by her poor taste in alliances. “But you didn’t hear my whole question. Imagine it’s a battle royale and Dinah is matched up with that ginger hag from your Coven, the one with the troll hair who looks like Grace Coddington—”

“Myrtle Snow?”

“That’s the one. In a death match where it’s Dinah Stevens vs Myrtle Snow, who wins? In _your_ opinion,” he clarifies. “Remember, Dinah may not in the same power league as the late, great Marie Laveau, but she’s still a formidable opponent who wouldn’t hesitate to fight dirty. I can’t say the same of your sophisticate.”

When the lightbulb in Mallory’s head finally goes on, she doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“I don’t believe it.”

“What don’t you believe?” Michael looks a little hurt. “You said to make conversation! This is me making conversation. I’m sorry if I’m not very good at it.”

Mallory wants to change the subject, but Michael would rather stay on this one.

“If that question was too hard for you, we can warm up with categories, like Salem vs Voodoo. For example, what if you take a Japanese fox witch, a _kitsune-tsukai_ , and match her up with—”

“Michael! I’m not talking about fantasy witch fights, or the Gorgeous Witches of Wrestling, or whatever you’re into. It feels gross and invasive, like you’re digging for information on the Coven’s offensive capabilities!”

“Aren’t I?” He stares off into the distance for a moment. There is a shift in his demeanor, and she doesn’t know what to make of it. “Mallory, may I ask you a personal question?”

“Okay…”

“Did you grow up without a father? My research tells me—”

“Yes,” she tells him the truth. Given Michael’s finely tuned radar for any kind of dishonesty or vacillation, he would know if she lied. Yet Mallory has no intention of telling him the full story of her mysterious origin—or the lack of a story, as it were, her lifelong doubt that she had no father at all.

Mallory’s mother—a gold-star lesbian who runs a feminist bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan—never claimed any kind of mystical conception, whether ethereal or infernal. But the young witch has always suspected that something was amiss. This is probably why Mallory lied to the Coven about having Salem descent. However guilty she feels, it spared her from having to deal with certain awkward questions.

Michael seems embarrassed by what he is about to say. “When you confronted me at the sermon about my, um, difficulty to get my Father to answer my summons, I lashed out. There was so much property damage, and even though the church has insurance for that—”

This doesn’t sound like the Michael she has come to know and despise.

“—I acted like a total ass. It was really unforgivable, but I would like to explain why. You see, my Father doesn’t always answer my ritual summons, not even when I perform a blood sacrifice.”

“ _Michael._ ”

“What? It’s not what I usually do, but it _is_ tradition. Anyway, listen. The last time that I cut open my veins to draw a pentagram, I thought that I could feel his presence all around me, enveloping my soul on its usual descent.” He swallows. Opening up to her is clearly taking a toll on him, and Mallory wonders why he’s doing it; she can’t think of a single earthly reason for this stunning burst of candor. “My Father deceived me. He didn’t answer that time. But someone else did.”

“Someone else? Who?”

“One of yours, a dead witch.” His voice drips with sarcasm. “The new underworld sensation!”

This makes no sense at all to Mallory. How could a witch, one who is presumably dead and rotting away in her own personal hell, answer a ritual summons meant for its architect?  

“It was the Loa’s assistant,” Michael clarifies, and suddenly it hits Mallory what dead witch he is talking about.

“Nan? Wait, Nan was pranking you when you were summoning Satan?”

“Don’t utter her dread name in my presence.”

She wants to laugh but the look on his face is murderous, and his knuckles turn white on the steering wheel. It’s time to change the subject.

“Michael, stop the car!”

He looks at her like she’s grown a second head and keeps driving past the stunning green meadow that just materialized around the bend like a vision of Heaven.

“Stop here. This is a good place for our picnic.”

When he continues to drive, muttering something about a magical short-cut ahead, she punches his shoulder, not caring if he punches back. “I’ve been cooped up inside for five whole days, no, _imprisoned_ underground, by you, Michael Langdon! And now I’m stuck in this car with you again, the man who kidnapped me and who refuses to restore my magic, who even now is keeping me on a very tight magical leash!”

It is true about the magical leash—Mallory is tied to Michael by a spell that keeps her in the general vicinity of wherever he happens to be.

“Calm down, Mallory, I only said—”

“I don’t care what you said, Michael, I need to feel the sunshine on my face as I run through that field, and I need to feel the grass under my toes and the breeze in my hair! I need to smell those purple flowers and—”  

“Fine! You may have your alpine sojourn, but just know that it’s a waste of my time.”

She exits the convertible and leans on the door for a moment before bounding away into the glorious field.

“It’s not a waste of my time, Michael. It’s called ‘communing with Mother Nature.’ You’d never understand.”

He follows her out of the car with the picnic basket and the blanket, but he doesn’t look happy. The crystal-clear mountain air, the distant snow-covered peaks, the constant birdsong, the verdant grass, the wildflowers that come in all shades of purple and blue—like an allergy of the soul, it offends his infernal sensibilities. To distract himself from the natural splendor, he starts looking for those tell-tale signs of human presence. The landscape is a treasure trove of trash, if you know where to look.

“Is this how you show respect for Mother Nature?”

On the ground is a crushed can of Pepsi, and next to it an empty package of Marlboros, an empty bottle of Jim Beam, and a dirty diaper, half unrolled.

“You pathetic humans claim to cherish the so-called creation of your false god, but you’ve turned the planet into a stinking dump.”  

Mallory is incredulous. “Michael, how can you complain when this place is fit for the gods themselves? Look at those radiant purple daisies. Look at those tiny blue forget-me-nots. This is the beauty you want to destroy!”

Still grumbling, Michael is starting to wander away beyond the sparse treeline. Increasing the distance between them causes the invisible leash that keeps them tethered together to go taut. The magic pulls her in his direction, never the other way around.

Mallory stumbles and she tries to keep up with him, picking more daisies along the way. When he finds a suitable spot for their picnic, he unfurls the blanket and plants himself down. But he’s not done ranting yet, or marveling at her inability to understand.

“You don’t need me to bring on the end times. You’re doing perfectly fine on your own. Mallory, the world ended already, and you’re just too dumb to read the signs. Global warming, no, _climate change_ , that’s the euphemism you people like to use, as if it’s just some natural process, like the change of seasons—”

“Oh, shut up, Michael. You’re such a bore.”

Like a gothic Julie Andrews, Mallory twirls and twirls on the grass, watching the mountain peaks spin in her field of vision. Yes, the hills are alive with the sound of a teenage Antichrist whining about cigarette butts and global warming, but it doesn’t matter now. _Nothing_ matters. She is on top of the world, far from her usual troubles.

Then inspiration strikes. If Mallory picks more of those darling Aspen daisies, she will have enough to weave into a flower crown.

What if she can persuade Michael that the world is worth saving, here and now, in this heavenly place? What if she can make him realize that he doesn’t need to follow the path his Father set out for him? Whatever Michael is doing to bring about the Apocalypse clearly isn’t up to scratch anyway, as Papa Satan barely answers his calls. What if the potent combination of the natural setting and Mallory’s carefully woven words (and woven flowers) could prevail where all seems hopeless? Why if she can turn the whole plan around?

“My King!” she shouts, sounding like Vanessa, hoping to distract him with an absurdity. It works. Michael looks at her in utter confusion as she sits down beside him, and allows her to coronate him with the purple daisy chain. He still looks lost and confused when Mallory trails her fingers down from the delicate flowers to the equally delicate curls that frame his deceptively lovely features.

When she tucks the curls behind his reddening ears, Michael shivers as her fingertips brush his skin.

Wonder of wonders! The boy actually leans into her touch, turning his cheek into the hollow of her palm, and when his eyelashes flutter against the sensitive skin there, she is unable to bear it—

Acting on impulse, Mallory leans in to press the ghost of a kiss to his mouth. There is no explaining it and there is no excusing it. She simply _does_ it, damn the consequences, and Michael is left speechless, too amazed to react. Eventually he finds his voice but it’s small and childlike.

“Mallory…”

“What?”

The second time it happens, Michael is the one who swoops in, claiming _her_ mouth in a bruising kiss that literally takes Mallory’s breath away. Their lips open in the same instant and the next thing she knows, their tongues are tangling to explosive effect.

Her insides liquefy. A low fire kindles in her belly. Michael groans when she takes the initiative, tipping his head back so that she can go deeper with her tongue, taste even more of him. Climbing into his lap and straddling his hips, she kisses him with total abandon now, and he responds in kind, gently supporting her head as he twines his fingers into her auburn hair.

Tugging lightly on her tresses, just enough for their mouths to briefly detach, he peers into her face with a new intensity. A storm rages behind those hooded eyes, which darken with fear and desire.

“Mallory…”

Her name on his lips is like a prayer to some unknown god, the patron saint of lost causes and impossible unions between Heaven and Hell.

Light, dark, it doesn’t matter. Mallory can feel it too, the tension crackling between them like an electrical wire. But it’s more than just sexual, and that frightens her.

Just as she’s about to go in for the third kiss, something shifts in the air, or inside Mallory. The tension slackens. The spell is lifted. The fire dies out. Mallory pulls back from Michael so suddenly that he is left holding the air, his face a carnival of emotions as he watches her back away in horror.

“Michael, I’m sorry, I can’t…”

She feels sick, twisted, guilty by association. How could she do this, with him? She remembers that the same lips now kissing hers had closed around a human heart not so long ago, and probably more than one. She imagines that poor girl from the Murder House that Madison told her about, screaming on the sacrificial altar as the priest reaches into her chest and pulls out the still-beating organ to give Michael, and Michael is—what? Hesitant, pitying? Not quite.

Eating that heart made him confident, powerful, more fully himself than ever before.

The teenage boy in front of her is none of those things, however. Bereft, misled, lied to, taken down the garden path… she can think of a few other ways to describe his facial expressions as they cycles through shock, loss, disbelief, and sadness before finally settling on fury.

Michael puts a finger to his lips where the trace of Mallory still lingers, and he almost looks pained by it, like he touched a corrosive acid.

“Mallory... just get in the car _._ ”

It’s different when he says her name the third time. Now it sounds like a curse, a threat. Fuck his deal with Cordelia, fuck his lost Ms Mead, fuck the jeering, treacherous Coven. Michael wants nothing more than to burn her soul to a crisp right then and there, then scatter the ashes in the beautiful meadow, if any remain.

Mallory can see clearly enough that the only thing holding him back is the exchange with Cordelia.

When she doesn’t get in the car as he commands, he confronts her violently, seething under his breath: “Need I remind you that you are on a very short leash?”

To demonstrate, he snaps an invisible chain in the air and the slight pressure on her neck turns into a full-blown chokehold. She loses her balance and jerks forward, coughing her lungs out. He doesn’t relent. As his magical leash snaps again, she is thrown on the grass, clawing at her throat, gasping for breath.  

She intended to do a kind thing but it became a disaster. What did she think would happen? A kiss isn’t charity, or a transfiguring miracle.

She should've known better.


	5. Hate, Actually

Michael blames it all on Mallory, of course. If it wasn’t for her stupid little frolic in the alpine meadow, he would be at Miss Robichaux’s by now, meeting with Cordelia to trade the life of her favorite student for the soul of his beloved Ms. Mead.

But no.

Mallory decided to plant that horrible kiss on Michael out of nowhere, a kiss so unexpected that it blew his concentration to smithereens, and now he’s driving in circles through an interdimensional “short-cut” and ending up in virtually every state other than Louisiana.

It all started to go sideways when they found the abandoned tunnel in the mountain, unmarked on the map but perfectly visible from the road. Mallory didn’t like the change in atmosphere as they entered the chilly darkness of the shadow dimension, a place where great distances contract to become small, and when the tunnel didn’t lead to a suburb of New Orleans like Michael had promised, but to a corn field near Wichita, Kansas, that is when the complaining really started.

On his latest attempt to get the mystical doorway to work, Michael ends up in downtown Pittsburgh, a city that Mallory recognizes by its yellow bridges. After a vicious debate on the relative merits of long-range transmutation, they are back on the road for their seventh drive through the shadows, and it is hard to ignore that the trips are getting longer and longer.

There are no landmarks in the barren landscape, no houses, no trees. Day and night are meaningless in the perpetual twilight. The only thing this place has in abundance are roads, but without any road signs, it is easy to get lost.

“I don’t understand where we are,” Mallory pipes up at the least opportune moment. “Is this Hell? Because I’ve descended before and it felt very different.”

Michael smiles at this interesting bit of information. So she _has_ performed _descensum_ as part of her Seven Wonders test, the sneaky little witch.

“That’s because this plane isn’t really Hell. It’s more … Hell-adjacent.”

“Hell-adjacent? I had no idea such a place even existed.”

“Of course you didn’t know. There are more things in Hell and Earth, Mallory, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, but I digress. If you want us to leave this dimension unharmed, you need to stop ruining my concentration with your incessant babble. You’ve been a nightmare this whole trip.”

“Me? You’re the one who keeps tugging at my ‘leash’ and nearly choking me to death anytime I say the slightest thing that provokes you. Which is pretty much every other thing I have to say.”

When he doesn’t reply, she squints at the featureless environment and makes out the outline of what she assumes is a person.

Absolutely terrific, Michael thinks. She noticed the “people.”

Milling about on the periphery of their vision are human-shaped shadows that dissolve into formless black if you try to look at them directly, but there goes Mallory, trying to ask them for directions.   

“Mallory, I know you’re new at this whole interdimensional travel thing, but there are rules to follow. Rule number one, never talk to the shadow people. Don’t even look at the shadow people unless you want to draw them closer to you.”

“Can’t _you_ talk to them, then? If you really are the princeling of Hell, then command them to help us find the exit. Or are you too much of a ‘man’ to ask for directions when you’re clearly lost…”

“Too much of a man?”  Michael wonders at her insolence, which truly knows no limits. “You don’t know a thing about me or the kind of man I am.”

Rolling her eyes, she crosses her arms over her chest, as if ready to give him silent treatment—which is really more a reward for Michael than a punishment.

“There it is!” He is relieved when he spots it, the pinprick of sunshine in the perpetual twilight. As the volatile doorway opens just enough to let a single car through, gone are the buildings and bridges from earlier, replaced by yellow-green marshland as far as the eye can see. The weather is balmy. The sun is at its zenith. This must be the Everglades.  

If they’re somewhere in Florida, Michael calculates, then New Orleans is at most twelve hours away. That means saying goodbye to the interdimensional portal and hello to the ordinary human roads. One problem still remains, however: Michael is half-asleep at the wheel, and he would rather feed Mallory to the alligators and crocodiles than let her drive his red car.

What to do? The best option is to find a motel for the night and then complete the drive in the morning. But how does he break the news to his irritating travel companion, who is sure to assume the worst?  Michael decides to distract her with an argument.

“There is darkness inside you, festering, spreading. I’m starting to think that your very soul is as black as the night, and you don’t even know it. Did you bother to obtain my consent before you kissed me on that accursed mountain? No, you didn’t. Instead, you acted on impulse because it felt good in the moment. Fuck the consequences in this age of #MeToo, right?”

Just thinking about what happened is raising his blood pressure all over again, and judging by the expression on Mallory’s face, she is similarly affected.

“Where the fuck did that come from?” Her brown eyes are more saucer-like than usual. “You’re not seriously talking about consent to me, are you, Michael? Did I consent to any of what happened to me over the last week, since you locked me in your basement and fucked with my mind? And did you ask those poor people in that criminal church of yours for permission to burn their bodies and souls?”

“That’s different. I’m on a divine mission to change the world. You can’t compare apples to oranges.” Although he is disappointed that she still doesn’t get it, Michael supposes that he can’t really blame her, given her upbringing. “I’m just reminding you of your own misbehavior so it doesn’t happen again when we find a motel. Oh, and you’ll need an alias to check in. I always travel incognito.”

It takes Mallory a moment to register what he said. The cogs in her head are still turning and clicking into place as he takes out his phone to look on Google Maps.

“Wait, what? A motel?” From the shocked way that she is looking at Michael, it’s like he mentioned a site of assignation rather than a place to crash for the night. “Why do I need an alias? We’re not on the run from the law. Unless you’ve been killing cops...”

Michael _has_ killed a cop or two in his time, chalking it up to youthful indiscretion, but Mallory doesn’t need to know about that warrant for his arrest.

“My alias is Daryl Van Horne. I would recommend that you call yourself Mrs. Daryl Van Horne.”

She actually laughs at the name. “Michael, you’ve lost your goddamn mind! I’m not pretending to be married, especially not to someone like you. Go fuck yourself.”

Why is Mallory still being so difficult? He contemplates using a spell to make her go limp like a ragdoll and then stashing her in trunk for a couple of hours until they arrive at the motel, but worries that she might hold it against him. Far better to gag Mallory with _Perpetuum clausis_ —this way, Michael will have a front row seat to watching her squirm, unable to speak or scream.

“I really wish you would stop struggling in your bindings, Mrs. Van Horne. I just found the perfect place for us to spend the night. We’ll be there in no time at all.”

 

***** 

_I have no mouth, and I must scream._

Mallory remembers reading a story by that title once. In the story, a supercomputer named AM destroys all of humanity but keeps one human alive to torture. The supercomputer alters the form of the man into a legless, armless blob so he can’t fight or run away, and it slows down the man’s perception of time so his agony feels endless.

She considers mentioning that story to Michael when he unseals her mouth from the spell, but decides against it. _Clever computer_ , he would probably say.

“I’m sorry, but getting separate rooms like you want is impossible. How can I keep an eye on you if you’re staying in another room? And what if you try to stab me in my sleep, like my biological mother tried to do?”

A shadow passes over his face at the mention of Vivien, and Mallory glories in the sight of his momentary pain. Michael is back to his scheming self in no time because now he is running his fingers through his curly hair, turning the honey color a deep chocolate brown.

“Did I mention we’ll need disguises? What do you think?”

Mallory likes the darker shade for how it brings out the unnatural blue of Michael’s eyes—not that she would ever tell him. But before she has time to react, Michael’s fingers are working on her scalp, turning her auburn waves platinum.

“Hey, I don’t want a disguise! And I hate this blonde!”

“Too bad, because it suits you.” Michael stands back to admire his handiwork. There is a glint in his eye that promises more indignities yet to come. “You know, being able to speak is a privilege, not a right. If you continue to abuse that privilege, I’ll have no choice but to erase your treacherous mouth, this time for good.”

Mallory sighs and takes his arm, relenting like the obedient little witch he wants her to be.

“Whatever you say, Mr. Van Horne. Lead the way.”

They enter the motel and proceed to the front desk where they are greeted by the concierge, a greasy-looking man in his fifties whose face brightens at the mere sight of them. From the way this concierge talks, he thinks he is running a five-star hotel.

“Mr. and Mrs. Van Horne, welcome to our humble establishment. I’m sure you’ll find everything to your liking.”

“Mrs. Van Horne” can’t help but feel a little exposed when the man keeps looking her up and down—no, looking them _both_ up and down, unable to conceal his obvious interest in the "married couple." You would think that Michael and Mallory were Adam and Eve in the flesh, arriving straight from the Garden of Eden, clad in nothing but fig leaves. She makes a mental note to check the room for hidden cameras.

When they get to their room on the ground floor, it is reasonably clean and spacious, much better than she feared. On impulse, Mallory dumps her bag on the bed, but then quickly removes it, remembering the man she is traveling with. 

“I’ll take the floor.”

Michael looks at her like she’s speaking in tongues.

“No, you’ll take the bed.”

Mallory is about to thank him for his gentlemanly behavior, when she notices that the look on his face is not that of a gentleman. “Wait, where will you sleep?”

“The bed.”

“I don’t understand. You said that you felt violated in the field when I…”

“Really, Mallory, you presume a lot. I already told you that you have nothing to fear from me in _that_ regard. In fact, you disgust me so much that I wouldn’t touch you if you were the last woman on earth, and pretty soon that could be the literal truth.”

This behavior is truly deranged. Mallory blinks, unable to speak for a moment. Mesmerized by the cut of his prideful face, she just stares as he sweeps a few errant curls from his forehead, changing his hair color back to its natural blonde.

Great. Now she can't even pretend that he's someone else.

“Did you not listen when I called you disgusting? Put on your sleepwear and get into bed.”

“I don’t have any sleepwear. I thought we were going straight to the Coven.”

While he scoffs at her lack of foresight, it’s not like Michael came unprepared. “I took the liberty of packing something for you to sleep in, just in case we got lost.”

 _That absolute shit_.

Out of his suitcase emerges a blood-red nightgown cut from the same material as the expensive-looking black pajamas he’s about to put on. Normally, Mallory would be too self-conscious to wear anything with spaghetti straps, but the silk of the nightgown feels like a dream against her skin so she relents.

When she comes out of the bathroom in the nightgown, Michael has moved to his side of the bed and pulled up the covers. He is giving her plenty of room, as you do with people you find disgusting. He seems to be asleep within minutes, and Mallory wonders if maybe, just maybe, this night won’t be so bad after all. 

At least she doesn’t have to look at his face in the dark.

 

***** 

A few hours later, a random light from the parking lot crosses Mallory’s face through the blinds. When she awakes, she’s in an unfamiliar space, smaller than her cell but bigger than her room at Robichaux’s. A fan spins on the ceiling and it’s unnaturally warm.

Strong arms encircle her waist, vibrating with the steady breaths of their sleeping owner. Having moved closer together in the night, their bodies are now entwined somewhere in the neutral territory in the middle of the bed. Mallory has become the little spoon to Michael's big spoon, she is horrified to learn, but she doesn’t exactly move.

She reminds herself to be fair. Michael is asleep. He doesn’t know what he is doing. It’s been a stressful day for them both, and Mallory has to be honest with herself: even now, her treacherous body is seeking the infernal heat of his chest, burrowing her ass deeper into his—

 _Oh, no_.

She gasps at the hardness that grazes her ass. Then she freezes. Any larger movement is guaranteed to make the situation ten times worse. What if Michael wakes up?

_Too late._

Her cheeks are burning from the intensity of her shame as his arms stiffen around her before withdrawing with a lightning quickness. The bed springs creak as the pressure on them shifts and Michael rolls onto his back. Mallory does the same, unconsciously mirroring his actions. Side by side, they lie like that for a while, neither daring to move or speak.

“Michael, I know you didn’t mean to…”

“No,” he quickly reassures her. “I’m sorry you had to feel that.”

“It’s totally fine. Maybe it’s time to get back on the road…”

As soon as the words leave her mouth, Mallory knows the idea is absurd. There are hours before dawn, and they both need all the sleep they can get before meeting with Cordelia (and dealing with the inevitable fallout of the trade going wrong). The idea of going back to sleep is equally absurd, however, as their bodies are on such high alert now, strung taut like bows and filling with adrenaline and dopamine and who knows what other hormone, buzzing and sparking with the same electrical charge they both felt in the meadow.

Mallory has never been more embarrassed about anything in her life. Diving under the covers to hide, she is mortified to smell her own arousal there, but there is little point in fighting it. Her desire has a mind of its own, a singular conquering purpose, and it will take what it wants when it wants it.

What it wants now is Michael, no substitutes, no delays. The very idea of delaying her gratification, of stopping to think the matter through, is deeply offensive to Mallory, like a slap in the face or a punch in the gut. She refuses to entertain it.

And so it comes to pass that she is _again_ committing the unthinkable crime (in Michael’s eyes) of not asking permission before her mouth crashes over his.

Blue eyes peer into brown, wide with shock. “What fresh hell is this?”

Mallory can barely contain her impatience as she grabs the silken collar of his PJs.

“Claiming you, like you clearly want.” She is speaking at a lower register than normal, her voice thick with want. “Don’t play coy with me, Michael. I know you orchestrated this whole thing, getting lost in the shadow dimension, just to get me into bed. Well, here am I. Do what you want with me.”

“I’m not falling for this shit again.” Michael pushes her away before she can plant her black flag on his squirming body. Mallory hates him more in that moment than she thought it was possible to hate anyone. Yet it’s not really his fault, not after the way she ruined yesterday’s kiss. How can she get him to trust her again?

It turns out that she doesn’t have to. Michael’s touch is whisper-light on the exposed skin of her neck and shoulders as he traces a sinuous line from her ears down to the straps of her silken nightgown. He examines her features for any sign of ill reaction, and when he is finally convinced that she won’t reject him again, he slides one strap off her shoulder and then the other, kissing the same line down her neck.

Mallory’s heart is galloping in her chest now, and Michael must feel it too, seeing as he lingers at her pulse points. Her self-control is fully gone by the time that he reaches her bare shoulders, and she is dying to remove the garment and bare all of herself to his gaze. But he stops her.

“If I knew you were this eager, I would have taken you from that second-rate witch school the second that I passed the Seven Wonders.”

It’s not in her best interest to challenge him, not when his tongue is doing unspeakable things to her earlobe, but Mallory can’t help herself.

“You never became the Supreme, Michael. Cordelia just let you think that. It was all in your head.”

He stops what he is doing and brings his hands up to her neck. “Excuse me? You’re awfully bold for someone so tiny and powerless.” His chokehold is playful, but there is an undertone of menace to his voice, a reminder that he holds her life in his hands.

If he does, Mallory is more than happy to surrender it. The realization hits her like a ton of bricks, scaring her more than anything that she has endured since her capture. Michael must sense the change in her because his grip on her neck relaxes immediately.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he whispers as he pulls her close, his lips seeking hers. She has never been more confused by his actions, yet leans into his kiss anyway, and it turns into another heart-stopping experience.

The infernal taste of his mouth excites her beyond all reason, and soon kissing Michael is no longer enough. Mallory needs to feel more, a lot more, and with such urgency that she nearly tears his silk pajamas in her desperation to get them off.  

Smiling against her mouth as she fumbles with the buttons on his shirt, Michael does her the kindness of removing his pants, exposing a perfectly shaped cock to her ravenous gaze.

Again Mallory makes a play for his crotch, and again Michael blocks her reaching hand, as if to say that tonight is about her pleasure and her pleasure alone.

“It’s not fair!” She sounds like a child being denied her favorite toy. She beats her tiny fists against his chest and doesn’t even care how it looks.

Forget all his murders and soul burnings. Forget the dastardly plan to turn the Earth into a smoking cinder.

Depriving Mallory of the silky feel of his cock is the cruelest thing that Michael has ever done.

“Why are you in such a rush? It will feel better if you take it slow,” he whispers like the sadist he is, capturing her delicate wrists with his much larger hands. “Besides, we have all the time in the world.”

What an absurd thing to say, Mallory thinks as she grits her teeth to stop the tears from flowing. With daybreak just around the corner and the meeting with Cordelia mere hours away, they have no time in the world to do anything, and they certainly have no world in which their union makes any sense.

Michael holds her chin and gazes into her tearful eyes. He is apologizing again, sounding almost like a little boy. The next thing she knows, he is complying with her wishes as his hands begin to work on her nightgown, which makes Mallory quiet down like a good little girl.

She can’t help but shiver as the silk caresses her nipples, slipping over her breasts to pool around her waist. She wants to slip it off completely, but Michael prefers her this way, like a present half unwrapped. She is becoming undone as his eyes rake ever-so-slowly over the newly exposed skin, as if he is memorizing every inch of her and filing it away for future reference. When he takes a nipple in his mouth, she nearly unravels on the spot.

Michael is utterly merciless in how he doles out her ruin.

With agonizing slowness, he kisses a stripe down her stomach to the edge of her panties, and then kisses her mound through the cotton, inhaling her scent as he removes the sodden material and throws it on the floor. Settling between her thighs for the long haul, he pries open her dripping folds and takes his first tentative lick.

From the way he groans and dives straight into her cunt, Michael must find her delectable. Mallory nearly screams at the feel of his tongue seeking immediate and violent entry.

Spread open for his delectation, her pussy is wetter than she ever imagined a pussy could get. And things only gets slicker once Michael changes up his mode of attack and begins to swirl his tongue over her clit until he unlocks a rhythm that makes her moan louder.

Mallory is embarrassed by the noises coming out of her throat, noises that sound more animal than human. These noises get exponentially louder when Michael begins to suck at the sensitive flesh, and she is crying out like a fawn being devoured by a pack of starving wolves as she nears the edge of her orgasm, then goes right over the cliff, with stars exploding in her field of vision.  

It takes her a while before she can feel her extremities again. Her soul takes its sweet time floating back into her overwhelmed body. Short-circuited by pleasure, her brain can’t form any useful thoughts at the moment, which is a good thing—it keeps away the guilt she is certain to feel once the euphoria wears off.

How irresponsible of Mallory to cum so hard in this hideous situation—and for the Antichrist, of all people. Morally tarnished and emotionally compromised, she will never look Cordelia in the eye again, let alone Coco or any of her sister witches.

Still, Mallory keeps reminding herself that nothing is over until it’s over, and that the world can still be saved. The important thing is to forgive herself for how Michael’s inner darkness complements her inner light, even though she knows that the darkness is growing in power and the light dimming away.

But who is to say that this isn’t the natural order of things, the universe’s way of balancing the scales? And what if that is precisely what the universe needs from Mallory—to be tainted and impure for the sake of all that is pure and good?

She turns towards Michael, who looks happy and satisfied despite receiving so little in return (and whose fault was that?). The sated expression melts right off his face when he notices how worried and guilty she suddenly looks.

He reaches over to feel her cheeks for tears. “Are you okay? What can I do to make you feel comfortable?”

Mallory reassures him with a quick peck on the lips. It would be a cruel to deny how amazing that felt, the orgasm and everything leading up to it, and so she praises him in the most vivid terms.

Basking in her unexpected words of praise, Michael looks at her like all his Winter Solstices came at once. “Did you really think so? I can make the next one feel even better, I promise.”

A few minutes later he is anxious to prove it, and his hands and lips are back to roving all over Mallory. Her engorged clit is in the same place he left it, awaiting his fiery ministrations, but now it’s her turn to curb his enthusiasm.  

“Slow down, Michael, it's too soon, I’m too sensitive…” 

“But you’re still so wet…”

From the way that Michael is looking at her now, Mallory can tell that he wants, no, _needs_ , to do more to her body than his current position will allow. Releasing her ass, he sits up to survey the landscape of her body. He strategizes, as he would with a Rubik’s cube or difficult spell.  

Selfishly caught in the moment, she whines at the sudden loss of contact, but the loss is only temporary. Soon Mallory is levitating off the bed as Michael hoists her legs over his shoulders, angling her hips for easier access. When he lets her go, she is floating in the air, cradled by an invisible force.

The feeling of being weightless is pleasant enough on its own, but Mallory loses herself completely when Michael redoubles his assault on her pussy and clit. He is impatient for her to cum again in this new and improved position, and now that his hands are freed to roam her body, his fingers have become the Eighth Wonder.

Somehow, he is touching her everywhere at once, caressing her ass and her back before coming around to her breasts, rolling and pinching her sensitive nipples as his mouth returns to her aching cunt, spearing it on his tongue with such viciousness that Mallory screams and bites down on her fist.

As she adjusts to a new wave of pleasure, his tongue leaves her hole so he can insert a single digit there, wiggling it around experimentally. Two fingers are exploring her from the inside, and now there _may_ be a third finger involved, but Mallory forgotten how to count. Michael's tongue is still a hurricane on her clit as his fingers pump in and out of her cunt at the exact right speed that she needs to crest over her second orgasm, this one more intense than the first.

It shouldn’t be possible to think in the aftermath of such pleasure, yet still she wonders: How is he doing this? Is he reading her mind? Probably not, yet the thought of Michael being clairvoyant doesn’t disturb her for its implications against the Coven. Rather, it excites her for the sexual possibilities.  

Much later, when her body has taken all it could take for the moment, she finds his face in the dark and whispers into his mouth: “I hate you so much.”

Michael’s lips are still wet from her juices when he pulls her into another searing kiss.

“Darling, I know.”

 

 *****

“No, I’m fine. He didn’t hurt me,” Mallory lies on the phone to Cordelia in the morning.

Michael only smiles at the lie and throws himself back on the bed, head dangling over the edge as he reaches for her legs. She moves out of the way, suspecting that he wants her to sit on his face. This is confirmed by the horribly lewd thing he does with his tongue, the thing that makes her lose all focus and begin to babble.

“Uh….no, it’s honestly okay, I didn’t…the important thing is that Coco is back at the school…”

When she turns her back to Michael, he takes it as a challenge. She nearly drops the phone when his arms snake around her waist from behind.

“Does your Supreme know how wet you are…”

He yelps as she elbows him in the stomach, but there’s no erasing the expression of triumph from his face. When Cordelia hangs up on her end, sounding reasonably assured that her most valuable young witch is safe and unharmed for the time being, Mallory returns the phone to Michael so he can check in with Mead, which is apparently something they do every morning on a certain schedule.

If he ever regains the woman’s soul and rebuilds her flesh-and-blood body—which is a big “if,” given that Shachath has it—what happens to the robot on the phone? Does it go on the scrapheap with all the other unloved machines or will Michael have two mothers at his disposal? If the latter were to happen, no one would be less surprised than Mallory.

Michael wants to take the call into the hallway for more privacy. Before he can leave the room, Mallory spots another blonde hair on the back of his sweater and goes to pluck it.

One hair from the sweater, two from the flower crown, three from the pillow, four in the comb—she is building herself quite the collection.

Who says the mission is over?

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Michael's alias, Daryl Van Horne, is the name of Jack Nicholson's character in The Witches of Eastwick (1987). It's kind of stupid that he chose that name for himself because Nicholson's "horny little devil" gets owned by three witches, who banish him with voodoo. At one point, Michael quotes Hamlet. "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is the title of a 1967 story by Harlan Ellison.


	6. Sons of God, Daughters of Men

Michael can feel the energy change as they turn the corner of Jackson Avenue and Coliseum Street. Miss Robichaux’s Academy rises before them, white and resplendent with its endless fluted columns, but the pain comes from something he can’t see. He leans on Mallory as they pass through the ornate ironwork gate, and she offers her arm for support. Warded to the teeth with a potent, unmistakably feminine magic, this house was never meant to admit someone as demonic as him.

Cordelia Goode stands at the front door, looking as resplendent as her school, dressed to the nines in a flowery skirt and black sleeveless coat. Although she wears no smile, she is not unhappy to watch him struggle. They approach the entrance and her magic finally begins to relent, just enough for Michael to cross the threshold. Inside, a wave of nausea washes over him but quickly passes. Once he can stand unsupported, he lets Mallory go, and she immediately runs into the open arms of her Supreme.

“My dear Mallory, thank goodness you’re okay,” Cordelia is whispering into the girl’s hair. “We were so worried about you. I never should have let you go on that mission.”

Shimmering between them like a shared aura, a burst of magic joins the regnant and future queens for only a moment—it's Mallory’s power being restored. The girl examines her own hands in wonder; her smile grows wider as the magic courses back into every parched atom in her body, and Michael returns the smile, so glad is he to see her made whole. His face drops when he sees Cordelia watching him strangely.

A joyous scream is heard from the top of the imperial staircase, followed by the patter of footsteps. At breakneck speed, Coco is running down to throw her arms around her friend, and now more witches are coming out of the woodwork, all gathering around Mallory.

No one gathers around Michael. The girls just ignore him, like he’s part of the furniture. Tired of standing around, he clears his throat and addresses Cordelia directly: “Mallory isn’t back in the fold just yet, Ms. Supreme. I believe we have some business to conclude.”

Cordelia raises herself up to her full height, but Michael is still taller. She regards him warily, like some variety of beast that is liable to pounce at any moment. Her students huddle behind her like a pack of gazelles confronting a lion.  

“Yes, we do have a deal, and I intend to honor it on my end. However, there are a few aspects of the summoning ritual that we need to discuss. Getting Mead back from the afterlife won’t be easy, and I can’t do it alone.”

Michael doesn’t like the way Cordelia’s voice drops nearly an octave when she mentions the caveat (of course there’s a caveat), and he wonders how exactly she plans to cheat him. Not to worry—Michael will get what he wants from Cordelia, and then some. Returning Mallory to the Coven in exchange for the soul of his mother is the next order of business, but he has no intention of letting them keep her.

“I think Mallory should come with me.” Eyes shooting daggers in his direction, Coco moves to escort her friend up the staircase, and Michael watches helplessly as Mallory disappears from view, but what can he do? There is a stabbing pain in his chest now, unrelated to the witches’ magic flowing all around the house.

He contemplates how far he has fallen. All it took was a week.

When Michael first saw Mallory, dressed like a Satanic groupie and ready to make trouble in his church, he planned to sacrifice her in a dark ritual, eat her heart and absorb her considerable power. He reconsidered this plan almost as soon as he imprisoned the girl and tested her abilities. She turned out to be so talented that Michael began to think: what if there is a better use for her magic, one that benefits him and his plan for the world?

His plans for Mallory are fluid, shifting. The girl is much too powerful to be given back to the witches, much too valuable of a chess piece to remain on Cordelia’s board, and—for purely sentimental reasons that Michael finds deeply disturbing, if not unexpected—much too precious to be allowed out of his sight when he kicks off the Apocalypse.

Convincing her to go along as the planet goes up in flames won’t be easy. Kindhearted and principled, Mallory is the push to his pull, the ying to his yang, the day to his night. Still, there must be some way to crack her resolve without destroying the key to her charm—that intensely bright light that shines out of her soul when she is happy, nearly blinding him if he looks too directly. It would be a pity to snuff it out like a candle flame.

Michael snaps out of his reverie when Cordelia steers him into the dining room and takes a seat at the end of a long table. He sits at the opposite end and watches all the girls file out the door but Queenie and Zoe.

Two older ladies enter the room, one of whom he knows—the wild-haired, couture-clad Myrtle—and the other he doesn’t recognize. Going by her voluminous white hair and expensive-looking attire, the second witch matches Myrtle in both style and temperament.

“This is Bubbles McGee, the newest member of my council. We only assemble in the gravest circumstances, but I think you’ll agree this qualifies.”

“I suppose that’s my cue to be flattered,” Michael spits out with pure hatred.

Memories are flooding back to him with a vengeance—the smell of her funeral pyre, the feel of her ash on his hands, the sting of hearing that her soul was beyond his reach, possibly forever, and the metaphorical slap in the face when Cordelia offered him—what? Not forgiveness, not salvation.

“And I suppose I won’t be getting a fucking apology after all that you have done.”

“What do you mean, an apology?” The Supreme looks incredulous, raising her statement eyebrows. “It was truly unfortunate that we had to execute the woman you think of as your mother, along with her co-conspirators, but their deaths were entirely lawful according to witch custom. She murdered one of our own in cold blood.”

“So it’s all an eye for an eye, then? If you consider the enormity of what you stole from me, Cordelia, every last person who sleeps under this roof is damn lucky to be alive.”

“And they will remain alive because of our agreement, Michael. Now, let me outline the steps of the ritual that you and I will perform together…”

As he settles in to listen, he steels himself against the inevitable disappointment. There is an ancient-looking volume on the table that contains the spell Cordelia that is describing, but the spell barely registers, so certain is Michael that she plans to cheat him just from observing the expressions on the other witches’ faces. These range from haughty awkwardness (Myrtle and Bubbles) to pants-wetting terror (Queenie and Zoe).

The more he listens to Cordelia talk, the more outrage rises in his chest and throat, until it feels like a slimy black ball threatening to cut off his airflow.

“Wait, let me get this straight. Instead of being in Hell where it belongs, the soul of _my_ Ms. Mead is floating around in fucking limbo or wherever, chilling with the Angel of Death, who just happens to be my father’s cousin, and who refuses to give it back unless I go there myself and fucking beg for it?”

That is rich, really rich. The unrepentant bitches really expect him to take the deal. Michael is so filled with rage that it rolls off him in invisible waves. The glassware on the table reverberates and the flowers shrivel up and die in their vases.

“…I’m not finished yet. And the only way that you and I can get there is we make a suicide pact and bleed out right here on your dining room floor.”

“Michael, we’ll be dying together and it won’t be permanent. I know they don’t teach resurgence at Hawthorne’s, and neither do we, under normal circumstances. I assume you have mastered it on your own time?”

He waits a beat. “I have.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about. Once you plead your case to Shachath, who is a very nice angel in my personal experience, the body of your mother will simply re-materialize at your side, just like my dear friend Misty Day's. I never did thank you for bringing Misty back, by the way,” the bitch adds as an afterthought.  

Her belated gratitude makes no difference to Michael.

“No, you don’t get it, none of you do. First, there is no such thing as a nice angel, _in my personal experience_. That winged bitch will never let me have anything, ever. Second, the moment you die, Cordelia, your energy will surge into Mallory so she can take your place as Supreme. All of this will happen while I’m either dead as a fucking doornail or resurrecting. How do I know that Mallory won’t decide to take her newfound Supremacy out for a spin, right then and there?”

Michael has no illusions about being a monster. Evil is his birthright, after all. Still, he sincerely hopes that his Mallory—and he has come to think of the girl as “his” now—is nothing like him whatsoever and wouldn’t try to harm him at his most vulnerable.

He can’t help but worry: what if it was all an act?

Last night was more glorious for Michael than he ever dared to imagine, opening up Mallory’s body like a gift and tasting her very essence, seeing her soul manifest like a beacon of heavenly light in the velvety darkness…  

But what if, for Mallory, it was only carnal pleasure? People are disappointing that way, Michael has learned, always ready to get themselves off, never hesitating to stab you in the back…

“You don’t have any guarantee that Mallory won’t try to hurt you, Michael, darling, which I hear is pretty hard to do anyhow.” That new hag named Bubbles is answering him in a superior tone.  “If you really haven’t harmed the girl like she claims, you probably have nothing to worry about.”

His knuckles are flexing white. His rage is simmering to a boil.

“I’m not doing it. No deal.”

What he plans to do next must be executed with clockwork precision or the gross hags will get wise. Concentrating on the spell book in Cordelia’s hands, Michael makes it vanish into his hands a millisecond before he transmutes upstairs to snatch Mallory from her friends. He has time enough to look Madison in the eye, taunting her with a “Surprise, bitch!” before he and Mallory transmute back to the car, where the key conveniently awaits in the ignition.

Success! With his witch in tow and all her abilities restored, Michael has everything he needs to summon the Angel of Death. He’s going beyond the veil, and he’s not going alone.

 

***** 

“What now?” Cordelia is pacing the room, struggling to think.

The last she saw of Mallory, the girl was speeding away in Michael’s red convertible when a strange black hole opened up in mid-air to swallow them whole. She has no idea where they went after that, and though Mallory’s life force is still present, it feels weak and distant, like she’s many miles away.

“Myrtle, help me. I don’t know what to do. He’s planning to kill her in the ritual, I just know it…”

The red-haired woman in the embroidered Moroccan caftan is the calmest one in the room. She sits at the table with Queenie and Zoe, cleaning her vintage glasses with a silk handkerchief.

“Delia, it’s not as grave as you think. Mallory has the gift of auto-resurgence, and can’t you see that the boy is in love? Michael looks at her the same way that Prince Egon von Fürstenberg used to look at me before he met the divine Diane.”

“Or the way that Warren Beatty used to look at _me_ before he got together with Natalie Wood,” Bubbles adds from the bar, where she is mixing herself a vodka tonic. Members of the council don’t usually drink during official meetings, but extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

Cordelia stops pacing and confronts Bubbles. “Did you get a read on him?”

The glamorous older witch downs her drink in one go. “Yes and no. The boy’s mind is a fortress, there’s no telling what’s inside. But his face is a whole other story…”

“And Mallory?”

“The girl isn’t an open book exactly, but I did catch a glimpse of some very confused emotions.” Bubbles pours another glass for herself. “A cocktail of fear, guilt, desire, sadness, empathy, devotion... Mallory is brave and determined to help the Coven and save the world, but she is equally determined to save the boy.”  

“You’re kidding.” The Supreme looks exhausted as she collapses next to Myrtle and puts her head on the table.

The older witch strokes her back. “It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to see the connection between those two. For now, that is the best protection the girl could have against our surprising little Antichrist.”

“Yeah, it would be romantic if it wasn’t so terrifying,” says Zoe, and Queenie nods. “Michael is capable of anything. He’s the human embodiment of evil. How do we know that he doesn’t have her under some kind of spell?”

Queenie is skeptical. “I bet it’s all Mallory. So typical to swoon over a pretty white boy, even if he’s the literal spawn of Satan…”

Myrtle gets up from the table to open the door. There is someone in the hallway, listening to everything being said in the dining room. A teenage boy with his ear plastered to the wall is trying to balance a silver tray filled with coffee cups and dessert dishes in both hands. The tray nearly falls when a woman’s voice blares out of nowhere, no more than an inch from his head.

“Madison, be a dear and fetch your mole person, who is eavesdropping on private council business!” 

Before the boy can scamper upstairs, dropping one of the cups in the process, Myrtle grabs his arm and speaks into his ear: “Christian, dear, there are better things out there for a nice boy like you than a life of sexual servitude under Madison's boot. Just say the word, and I’ll get you a first-class ticket back to California, where you belong. She doesn’t even have to know.”   

Speak of the devil, or the bitch—Madison is standing at the top of the stairs with an unlit cigarette in her hand, glaring down at the elder woman.

“Hag, please. I’m the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to Christian. He drops to his knees every day to kiss my Valentino platforms.”

Hawthorne boy banished, Myrtle returns to the dining room and clears her throat. She throws Bubbles a conspiratorial look before continuing: “Since no one else is going to say it, I will. Has it never occurred to you that it’s Michael who has reason to fear our young Mallory?”

Queenie and Zoe have no idea what she means.

“Before Mallory and Coco went on their disastrous mission, our Supreme shared some information about the girl, and this information disturbed me very much. Delia should be the one to tell the story.”

The Supreme looks supremely embarrassed, almost scared to begin.

“Right. Mallory told me about a terrifying power she has, a power never seen before in the history of the Coven: the power to change reality with her dreams. Once when she was very little, before her abilities had fully manifested, she went to sleep in one world and awoke in another, with memories of both timelines, two versions of events. I know it sounds insane, but I believe she was telling the truth.”

There is an uncomfortable silence after Cordelia explains what Mallory told her in more detail. The younger witches don’t know what to think, while the older witches are busy thinking and scheming, weighing options and questioning alliances.

Queenie speaks first. “Maybe we’re all living in a new reality dreamed up by Mallory already, and we just don’t know it.”   

“Exactly,” Myrtle says. “Allow me to be as blunt as I know how to be. If Mallory’s dreams can alter the very shape of our world, then the girl could present a danger to everything we hold dear.”

Bubbles nods in assent. "Maybe we should just let her go and hope that nature runs its course..."

Zoe looks shocked by what she’s hearing.

“I can’t believe you could even _imagine_ such a thing! Mallory is our sister! If this is how we talk about our own now, I will have no choice but to resign from the council.”  

“Zoe, it’s entirely possible that you’re mistaken about Mallory being your sister. I fear that the girl is far more than that. Think, Delia, just think. What do we actually know about Mallory? We know that she’s no descendant of Salem. There are no witches in her maternal line like she claimed upon arriving here, and as for her paternal line? We have no idea who her father is, or was, or if anyone even sired her in the conventional sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s in the Book of Genesis, dear. Heroes of old, warriors of renown. I think Mallory could be one of the Nephilim.”

Cordelia stands up from the table to face the council. The Supreme is so far down the rabbit hole that she despairs of ever clawing her way out. If she regained her sight years ago, why is she still wandering around half-blind, only ever seeing a small part of the bigger picture? Hank, Misty, Queenie, Nan, Kyle—all were mistakes in their own way, and she can’t afford to make any more, not with the world literally at stake.

“All of you, pipe down. That includes you, Myrtle. We don’t know why she lied to us about having Salem descent. I’m sure there was an excellent reason. Mallory is an integral part of the Coven, and I would never put one of my girls in harm’s way.” Her legs are visibly weak yet her voice is booming. “What Myrtle and Bubbles are conveniently forgetting is that Mallory is the only one capable of performing _Tempus infinituum_ and ending the threat of Michael once and for all.”

Out of her pocket she takes a wad of blonde hair—Michael’s—and slams it on the table for everyone to see. “She slipped me this as I was unblocking her magic.”

“That doesn’t mean that her loyalties will remain with the Coven,” Myrtle warns sagely. “If Mallory is really one of the Nephilim, you can’t deny that she has something in common with Michael. A divine lineage.”          

“Terrific,” Bubbles exclaims. “Michael isn’t a warlock. Mallory isn’t a witch. No wonder they’re getting along like a house on fire.”

On the verge of tears now, Cordelia is determined to maintain the appearance of strength for the sake of the council. Myrtle goes to comfort her again and this time she pulls back, offended by the elder’s insinuations against her star pupil. Nephilim or not, Mallory is innocent, and her Supreme will get her back from Michael even if it kills her.   

“You know what they say about love, Delia…”

“That it’s is an eternal mystery, never to be fully understood?”

Myrtle has abandoned all sense of propriety as she goes to light a long-stemmed cigarillo inside the house. “That it’s a cruel joke played on the human race to ensure our propagation.”

“How cynical of you.”

“Doesn’t make it any less true. _Amor vincit omnia_. What a beautiful dream.”

 


	7. To Die For

Familiar arms wrap around Mallory’s waist and transmute her away to a familiar car.

“Michael! What are you doing?”

“Deal’s off,” he barks and steps on the gas, dropping an ancient-looking spell book in her lap. The screaming faces of her sisters linger in the rearview mirror for only a moment before the interdimensional portal opens up to swallow them whole. They are driving on the eerie twilit road for less than a minute when it opens again and deposits them in the heady California sunshine.

Sputtering like the abused machine that it is, the red convertible lands on a quiet street lined with palm trees, no different than a thousand others in suburban Los Angeles. Michael parks in front of a pastel-colored bungalow. He unlocks the door with his own key and holds the door open like a gentleman.

“Welcome to my childhood home,” he tells Mallory.

The house looks as unremarkable as the neighborhood—that is, until she sees the shrine in the kitchen. Arranged on a black cloth are six red candles, a silver pentagram, a human skull, two cups with dried blood on the rim, and a framed picture of Baphomet.

“This is where Ms. Mead used to live?”

Michael nods like a lost puppy.

“Does the robot live here now?

“Sometimes. She won’t need to once I get the real one back.”

Abducted again, Mallory should be angry at Michael for separating her from her sisters, but all she can think about is the profound sadness he still feels about losing Mead. His sadness is like a punch in her own gut, or worse, a knife twisting in her own viscera. However evil and unhelpful that woman was in the larger scheme of things, removing her from Michael’s life in such a brutal manner was the worst thing that Cordelia could have done.

Mallory isn’t done asking questions. “Is that why you brought me here? To help you summon Shachath? To die when you die, revive when you revive?”

A pale fire ignites in his maddeningly beautiful eyes. His voice is raspy, like he hasn’t used his vocal chords in a century. “Actually, no. That’s not the reason you are here, Mallory.”

Not for the first time in their acquaintance, she thinks that he resembles a vengeful angel, something divine yet terrible to behold and filled with a righteous anger. A servant of God might look like this before starting a flood to drown everything that has the misfortune to breathe, or destroying a city because a few bad men happen to live in it, or killing every firstborn in the wrong tribe just so the Almighty can make a point. 

It takes her a moment to realize that his anger is directed not outward but inward, not at Mallory and the witches but at Michael. Her abductor is furious at himself for having to modify his plans around her, in consideration for her safety and happiness, and yet modify them he must—there is simply no other option. Slowly, too slowly for Mallory’s liking, the white-hot fury abates, extinguished into a redly glowing ember. Michael is speaking more calmly now, taking deep and measured breaths.

“At first I wanted to us to commit suicide and revive together, like Cordelia suggested that she and I do at the school…” He sneers at the ridiculous idea that he would consent to die under his enemy’s roof. “…But then I realized it’s too dangerous to involve you in the ritual. Instead, you’ll keep watch over me as I perform it myself, tomorrow at dawn.” His voice is unexpectedly soft. “Only if you want to.”

She blinks at the change. Is this the same Michael Langdon who locked her away in a dungeon, throwing every type of horror her way—a poisonous snake, a refrigerated corpse, an invisible leash, an erased mouth? Then again, the same Michael Langdon spent most of last night with his face buried in her cunt, making her cum so many times in a row that her body never stopped humming his tune.

Mallory can’t imagine that her feelings about this second abduction have nothing to do with the intimacy they shared on their trip to New Orleans. But neither is she naïve enough to think it was only carnal pleasure. That’s the part that scares her the most, and it scares Michael too, she can tell.

As he crosses the kitchen to be nearer, Mallory takes a stumbling step backwards and nearly collides with the Satanic altar. He towers over her, but he doesn’t loom. “I will never harm you again, Mal. That is a solemn promise. Everything that happens from now on will happen only because you want it to.”

“I don’t understand what that means. Am I free to go?”

“If you wish.”

A loud rumble is heard throughout the house, a noise that originates somewhere deep in its foundations. It’s like his childhood home is groaning with loneliness, protesting her imminent departure. This place has seen so much loss, Mallory thinks before she makes her decision. In reality, it was made long before.

“I want to stay. I want to help you perform the ritual. I want to talk to Shachath.”

“Absolutely not. I can’t let you risk actually dying.” His chin brushes the top of her head as his arms instinctively flex around her back, pulling her close. “And why would you want to? Angels aren’t very nice.”

As he tightens his embrace, Mallory stiffens. Pressing her thighs together, she tries to ignore the sudden and inconvenient flare of desire down below. This isn’t a great time to be thinking about _that_ , not with her mind in such a confused state and so many problems left to resolve.

“You said that nothing happens if I don’t want it to happen,” she mutters into his shirt, inhaling his infernal scent, that sweet note of darkness that is unmistakably his. When he tilts her chin up so their lips can meet, she barely manages to finish her sentence: “…and I don’t want you to start the Apocalypse.”  

Now it’s Michael’s turn to stiffen. He drops her chin and withdraws with such obvious effort that it reminds her of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast to resist the call of the sirens.

“Now you’re being greedy. I’m not wrapped around your little finger just yet.”

And that’s it. He turns away. The enchantment is lifted.

They spend the next hour preparing a meal that is best described as gourmet French toast, complete with sausage, scrambled eggs, and some kind of fruit sauce that sounds disgusting in theory but that Mallory surprisingly loves. The atmosphere is not relaxed exactly, but neither is it heavy and torturous, weighed down by thoughts of humanity’s future. As they eat, Michael scrolls through his phone and complains about his followers. To her amazement, he hands her the device so she can see the “tragedy” for herself.

“This looks like some kind of chatroom on the dark web.”

Michael nods. “It’s like Facebook for Satanists. I swear people use it to annoy me all day long. My followers only have three settings. One, they tell me what they want. Two, they tell me what I should be doing to bring the Apocalypse. Three, they worship me blindly, so needy and pathetic. I hate that so much.”

“That’s good because I’m not about to fall on my knees, literal or figurative.”

He smiles as she scrolls down the page, clicking on a few different threads. Michael is right: when his followers aren’t busy giving him orders and making outrageous demands on his time and magical resources, they’re in full supplicant mode, grovelling in the proverbial dirt.

“Who are ‘NutButter’ and ‘TheIronPfist’?”

“Just some coked-out nerds from my future R&D department.”

Michael hasn’t even bothered to make an appearance in this chat. In fact, most of the “conversations” are just people shouting into a Michael-less void. 

 

[TheIronPfist] By now you probably heard the news about the bad batch of coke that sent us to the ICU.

[NutButter] Not cool, bro, not cool.

[TheIronPfist] Normally we can snort whole mountains of the good shit without getting the sweats, all thanks to His infernal bounty. Not this time. It’s almost like someone is trying to poison us, but who would want to?

[NutButter] Exactly. Everyone loves us at Kineros. Listen, bro, I’m not saying we’re in this for the bottomless nose candy, but if you could put in a good word for us with your dad, we’d be eternally grateful, and I mean eternally.

[TheIronPfist] In other news, we’ve found the perfect administrator for Outpost 3. She’s kind of like a Victorian Nurse Ratchet, only hotter and with a bigger stick up her ass. You will love her.

 

“ _These_ are your henchmen?” Mallory scrunches up her nose. “They sound like such creeps.” 

The truth is that her stomach drops at the seeing “Outpost 3” and she pretends to be unaffected. Michael has mentioned these outposts before on their drive to New Orleans, but when she asked him to clarify, he just changed the subject. What are they exactly? Mallory intends to find out, but now is not the time to pry any further, not with his phone in her hands. And while she suspects that he deleted or hid anything truly incriminating before handing it over, she is still a little amazed at this new level of trust and is dying to see where it leads.

If Michael trusts her enough to give up his phone, what does that make Mallory? The very idea of sharing in his dastardly exploits, even as a witness and not an accomplice, makes her sick to her stomach.

She remembers the tainted joy of seeing Coco again and hearing her best friend scream her name. A line from _Ghostbusters_ perfectly describes what she felt at that instant: _There is no Mallory, only Zuul._ Or Mrs. Daryl Van Horne. Same thing in the end. Equally monstrous.

Mallory would rather not pursue that train of thought down the rabbit hole of guilt and broken promises, and so she keeps scrolling through Michael’s phone like she’s nothing more than a suspicious girlfriend.

The next conversation really _does_ make her feel like a girlfriend, however complicit that sounds.

 

[Hotfordevilbaby] You’ve been gone for a whole week, my King. Where are you? Why have you forsaken me? When are you coming back?

[Hotfordevilbaby] It’s lonely here without you.

[Hotfordevilbaby] Hello?

[Hotfordevilbaby] Michael?

[Hotfordevilbaby] I yearn for you, chosen one. I burn for you, spawn of the most foul.

[Hotfordevilbaby] Choke me.

[Hotfordevilbaby] Slap me.

[Hotfordevilbaby] Stab me.

[Michael_Langdon_Antichrist] No.

[Michael_Langdon_Antichrist] For the last time, Vanessa, no means no. If you stab yourself again, I’m calling my Father to get you off the list for the hottest circle of Hell.

[Michael_Langdon_Antichrist] Those spots are extremely coveted, and I happen to know a few ladies who are a lot more deserving than you.

[Hotfordevilbaby] Michael, you responded! I’ll be good, I promise. I mean, I’ll be bad, real bad. Please don’t take me off that list.

 

“Why do you even respond to this girl? She sounds so desperate.”

Michael smirks at her obvious jealousy and explains there are lots more like those messages, and lots more Vanessas, all mostly ignored. Buried under an avalanche of thirst and inanity, like an unlucky skier under ten feet of snow, is the occasional serious communiqué.

 

[Devil_Mama_2.0] Michael, you’re not answering your phone so I’m trying you on the network. Are you watching CNN?

[Devil_Mama_2.0] Three members of the Cooperative were killed today by what I suspect is a coalition of international covens, though none have claimed responsibility. All of my Mossad training makes me think it’s a coordinated effort.

[Devil_Mama_2.0] Brin in Palo Alto. Buffet in Hong Kong. Bezos in Washington.  

[Michael_Langdon_Antichrist] Ha! Did they get the A's first?

[Michael_Langdon_Antichrist] Hello?

[Michael_Langdon_Antichrist] …

[Michael_Langdon_Antichrist] Ms. Mead?

[Devil_Mama_2.0] That is not the answer I was hoping for, Michael. I don’t think you’re taking this seriously at all. The problem with the witches is a lot worse than we thought, and you haven’t even dealt with your local coven.

[Devil_Mama_2.0] When I come to LA next week, I better not see that witch there. What would your Father say if he knew about the company you’re keeping?

[Devil_Mama_2.0] Will report back when I’ve investigated the crime scenes. In the meantime, please behave like the scion of Hell you are. Mead, out.

 

He purses his lips when Mallory shows him the screen. She is trying hard to ignore Mead’s mentioning the “local coven” that Michael “hasn’t even dealt with.” That can wait for a more opportune time.

“I don’t give a fuck about Buffet and Brin and whoever. The fewer Cooperative members we have, the better. As for the robot, it’s gone the second I get my real Ms. Mead back. It’ll be singing ‘daisy, daisy’ as I dismantle it personally and sell it for parts.”

He furrows his brow in such a vulnerable way that it makes Mallory’s heart seize in her chest while sending a magnetic pulse directly into her cunt. How can she be sad for him and aroused at the same time?

“That’s a little heartless. I think the robot’s kind of sweet. She’s just looking out for your best interests.”

“Even though she’s itching to slit your throat to the bone and feed you to the crows that still circle this house from time to time?”

“Even then.”

“Then you’re a very generous witch.” His fingers slide down the table to creep up the inside of her right arm, stroking the bare skin there. She leans into the touch as the fingers climb higher to caress her shoulder and collarbone before dipping below the wide collar of shirt. Mallory wears no bra underneath. She understands now that was a deliberate choice, conscious or otherwise.

“Before we do anything, Michael, I need to know that things are going to be totally transparent between us.”

He pulls his hand from her shirt. “What do you mean, transparent? Kind of like you collecting my hair all over the motel room, thinking I wouldn’t notice?” He gets up from the table and circles around her chair; she refuses to move.  “You witches must think I’m blind, or stupid. Voodoo doesn’t work on me. You of all people should know that.”

Mallory sighs as she feels his arms grip her shoulders from behind. This was a conversation they were always going to have. At least he hasn’t mentioned the _Tempus Infinituum_. Does he even know that spell exists?

“The hair was never my idea, Michael. Getting a sample was the whole point of my being at your church, and I had to give Cordelia _something_. Would you rather I return empty-handed when I had the chance to complete the mission, and have them suspect me of changing sides?”

The furrowed brow is back. “But you haven’t changed sides. You’re not loyal to me. You still belong to Cordelia.”

She grits her teeth at his proprietary tone. And they were doing so well. “I don’t belong to anyone, not to you, not to Cordelia. I’m my own person. That will never change.”

“Of course.”

Animosity crackles between them like an electrostatic charge as she rises to her feet. There is no getting around it, that deep-seated mistrust that colors all their interactions. The love-hate that Mallory has for Michael is like gasoline poured on a fire—it accelerates her desire and makes her yearn for his touch so badly that it shows all over her treacherous face. His much stronger body pins her smaller one against the altar. Cups, candles and skull all go clattering to the floor, but Michael doesn’t care about the blasphemous display.  His lips are on her neck in an instant, and she is shifting her body to give him better access even as her hands are pushing him away.  

“I want to apologize for last night,” she practically pants.

“For what? It was glorious.”

“I acted … unlike myself. I’m not usually the aggressor in that situation.”

“‘Not usually’? How much experience have you had exactly?”

“Not much. Very little, in fact. Almost none,” she answers honestly, and when she feels him frowning against the hollow of her throat, she resists the impulse to ask if he is a virgin. Based on the extreme level of skill he displayed last night—she still shivers at the memory of his lips, tongue and hands exploring her body, setting every nerve ending alight—she would guess no. But a growing understanding of Michael tells Mallory otherwise. The likeliest scenario is that it was all devilish improvisation, a kind of demonic intuition that makes him so good at nearly everything he attempts on the first try.

They move to the living room couch, discarding their clothes along the way. Well, _her_ clothes more than his. By the time Mallory’s shirt goes flying through the air, Michael is already on his knees, unbuttoning her pants with hellish haste before she can make a single move to undress him. Their roles from last night are reversed—this time, it’s her who wants to slow down and him who is rushing to get her naked like the world is about to end. They kiss with such urgency that it bruises and breaks the sensitive skin of her lower lip, making Michael pause for a moment. His finger ghosts over her lip, collecting the blood like a sacred offering.  

“I’ve hurt you.” He looks at the drop on his finger with alarm. “Let me make it better.”

Closing her eyes, Mallory leans into the texture of his tongue as it swipes across the injury, making it vanish as the broken skin knits together. Once her lip is completely healed, Michael sucks on it lightly, just enough to make her gasp at the sensation, and his clever tongue uses the opportunity to enter her mouth, battling her own for supremacy.

Finally Mallory manages to get Michael’s shirt over his head, exposing a pale chest that is solid but not overly muscled, which is exactly how she likes it. Her hands run along the smooth skin there, delighting in how it makes him shiver. If she were to lay her head down and listen, she is certain that she would hear a heart synched to her own, in all its wild and unpredictable rhythm. Now slow and languid. Now hammering and rabbit-like.

How is it possible for their hearts to beat as one? Michael and Mallory have nothing in common. She doesn’t understand why he wants to destroy the world. He doesn’t understand why she wants to save it. Their moral philosophies couldn’t be more different, and yet none of that matters as he moves down her body, searching for that sweet essence. He is in such a rush to taste her again that he doesn’t even remove her panties, just pushing the fabric aside to lap at her folds like a man lost in the desert who just found an oasis.

“Fuck, Michael, how are you so … so good at this…” She watches him through hooded eyes, admiring the fall of his golden hair as he’s hard at work. As he quickens his tongue, she tugs at his curls and grinds herself deeper into his face, and he responds with a decadent moan. Two fingers start pumping in and out of her hole at the steady rhythm they already established, and Mallory is fast approaching her point of no return. The sound she makes as she orgasms is so warped and inhuman that she fears for the sanity of Ms. Mead’s neighbors.

“If we’re going any further,” he breathes into her neck, “I need to know you’re not going to hurt me.”

Why does she have the feeling that he’s not talking about her powers?

This time he lets her to touch his cock, but only with her hands; when she tries to impale herself on it, he suggests they go upstairs where she will be more comfortable. Good idea. There is more kissing on the stairs before they tumble into his childhood bedroom, and Mallory has no time to examine her surroundings before her back hits the mattress and Michael’s entire weight is on top of her. His cock is divinely heavy in her palm as she guides it to her entrance, then keeps it there a moment, letting him rut ineffectively into her hand.

“I thought you couldn’t wait to have me inside you…”

Oh, but she _can_ wait, especially now that she understands how badly he needs her, and that denial is such a rush in itself. Her power trip ends when his weeping head rubs against her clit and suddenly Michael is right—she _needs_ to feel him inside right away.

“Okay, but go _slowly_. The first and only time I did this, and it was bloody and a total disaster.”

Michael doesn’t like what he’s hearing. Did he expect her to be a virgin, untouched by anyone other than him? It would appear that he is one, but you’d never know it from the infinitely thoughtful way he has prepared her for the breach. His cock slides into her slowly, luxuriating in the slight resistance that meets it. Mallory is unaccustomed to both his length and his thickness and so prepares for a surge of pain; none comes because she is _that_ wet. Inch by inch, Michael gives her time to adjust to his size, and in no time at all she is desperate for more friction.

At first he is tentative, mindful of her comfort. Her moans are so encouraging that he picks up the pace, and soon his movements are freer, penetrating deeper with every thrust. Mallory closes her eyes from the intensity of the pleasure, surrendering herself to the sensation of fullness, but Michael’s desire to be seen is so strong that he wants her eyes open, focused only on him.

He kisses her deeply as he puts a pillow under her ass and changes the angle of his thrusts, striking that special spot that has Mallory seeing stars. She whispers in his ear that she is ready to cum, that she wants them to cum together, and he continues to fuck her with a single-minded concentration, a severe windstorm whipping behind his blue eyes.

“Mal, I’m so close…”

“I am too… fuck, I’m cumming…”

What she sees next should frighten her, but it doesn’t. Instead, she is _fascinated_. Michael looks demonic as he careens over the edge, his eyes turning the color of pitch. A strange pallor spreads over his skin, giving it the appearance of marble. The effect lasts for a fraction of a second before the angelic boy is back in her arms.

“Where did you go when your eyes turned black?” She asks hours later as he’s falling asleep. He doesn’t answer.

 

***** 

As the first light of morning breaks through the blinds, Mallory finds herself in an empty bed. The realization hits her as soon as she’s lucid enough to form thoughts, and her tired legs can’t take her downstairs fast enough.

 _Michael is doing the ritual_ , _and he didn’t even wake her._

She finds him in the center of the living room. All the furniture has been pushed to the walls to make room for the magic circle, and the candles that mark its perimeter are flickering in unison, which means that a spell is in progress. Entering the circle, Mallory tries to rouse Michael, shake him awake, slap him back to life. His body is cold and stiff.

Tears stream down her face as she administers the _Vitalum Vitalis_. Nothing happens, either because of the ritual or because Mallory is too weak and emotional. Michael remains dead. It doesn’t help to know that it’s only temporary, a way of summoning the Angel of Death so he can ask for Mead’s soul back, a ritual no more dangerous than _Descensum_ , which they’ve both performed successfully.  

It takes time to rifle through all his pockets—the idiot dressed in a three-piece suit for the summoning—but it turns up eventually, the small glass vial containing six white pills. She doesn’t know what dosage he took and so swallows all six, reciting the spell from the book lying open by his side:

_Exaudi_ _me,_ _angelus mortem,_ _et_ _ut me ad locum in quo non est superius et inferius..._

Already getting sleepy, Mallory dries her tears, smooths out her clothes, and lies down on the floor beside Michael’s corpse, interlacing her fingers with his. Death is a small price to pay to follow Michael’s soul wherever it went—to limbo, to Hell, to the end of the world. She finds that she is impatient for death, and that death comes stealthily, kind of like falling asleep.

When she awakes, there is no whooshing sound of powerful wings. There is no Angel of Death staring down at her with a benevolent smile. Most upsettingly, there is no Michael. Instead, she is alone on a beach, cold waves tickling her bare feet. Everything is tinted a soft grey, not colorless exactly but somehow drained of life.

The landscape is shrouded in fog, impossible to see beyond a few feet, but she has a clear view of the sea or lake, which stretches for what seems like forever, broken in only one place. There is a house in the middle of the water, identical to the one she just left. She has a pretty good inkling of what, or who, awaits him inside. 

Straining her eyes to see better, she notices a small boat on the water, afloat halfway between the beach and the house. Mallory waves her arms and shouts his name at the top of her voice, hearing it multiply in the echoing vastness of limbo.   

Michael changes course when he sees her, rowing back to the shore.

 


	8. House on the Lake

The Angel of Death is there when he opens his eyes. Her wingspan is so enormous that it blots out the sun, or what passes for sun in this wretched dimension. Her black clothes are cut in the style of the 1940s. She has the softly lined face of a woman in her sixties, and black eyes that are neither kind nor unkind, and red lips that curve into a smile behind a fishnet veil.

Where the fuck is he, anyway? The sky is grey, the land is grey, and the water is grey. Even Michael is grey, bathed in the desolate light of limbo. He is so tired and doesn’t even know why. Isn’t he dead? How can he be tired  _and_  dead? And why is the angel smiling? He has travelled all this way to see her, this dutiful servant of the false god, and now she’s looking down on him both literally and figuratively, mocking him for his trouble.

“You’re wrong about that, Michael,” Shachath speaks in a sonorous voice. “I never mock, or judge.”

He draws himself up on his elbows. “Really? Could have fooled me.”

The bird-like creature rolls her eyes, but she does it indulgently, the way a grandmother might with a naughty child.

Well,  _somebody’s_  grandmother.

“I suppose a certain amount of arrogance is to be expected from a boy such as yourself. But let me to remind you, my dear cousin once removed, that you are here as a supplicant. You came to ask a favor from me, not the other way around.” 

Arrogance is a quality he wears proudly, but he hates being called a boy, and as for the angel’s wretched perversion of familial terms, that hardly deserves a response. The only family Michael recognizes is the one he chose, or the one that chose him.

“You can read my mind so you know why I’m here. Do you expect me to beg?”

“If you were to do that, dear boy, it would shatter your ego beyond any hope of repair.” The angel folds her wings behind her back, exposing him to the glare of the substitute sun. “Tell me about your mother.”

“Which one?”

“Don’t be a smartass.” She kneels down so they’re eye to eye, and lifts her veil. “The woman you came here to retrieve, the one who awaits you in that house over there.”

Michael didn’t notice the house floating on the water not far from the shore, the same house where he spent the only happy part of his largely miserable childhood. Nearby on the sand is a rickety, leaky-looking boat with a pair of half-rotten oars.

“Please tell me that’s not my only means of transportation.”

“Afraid so,” replies the angel with a self-satisfied smirk. “You’ll use it to bring Miriam back to the shore, but remember, there is one condition. Keep her out of the water. If she falls in, you leave here empty-handed and won’t see her again until Judgment Day.”

Michael’s eyes roll in the back of his head so hard it’s amazing they don’t get stuck there.

“If were the suspicious type, I might think you were planning to push my Ms. Mead out of the boat, just for the thrill of seeing me lose her again, and to another element. Admit it.”

Really, what did he expect of the false god’s hype men? Capable of limitless cruelty, angels have been up to no good since the beginning of Biblical time. Long before his Father ever aspired to end the world in a great conflagration, the so-called Almighty sent his choir of sycophants to drown it. And who can forget all those Egyptian firstborns that had to die just so their pharaoh could be taught a lesson before he released the people of Moses from bondage? A lesson he was incapable of learning because an all-powerful being hardened his heart. 

“As long as you follow the rules, you have nothing to worry about,” Shachath reassures him. “Before you start on your journey, answer one question: what does that woman mean to you? Who is Miriam Mead to Michael Langdon?”

“Without Ms Mead, I’m totally lost,” he confesses. “I don’t know how to end the world. My magic isn’t strong enough, and my other associates want to use science.”

This isn’t what the angel wants to hear. Of course it isn’t. Michael shuts his eyes and throws himself back on the ground like a toddler in the throes of a tantrum. What does this ethereal bitch want from him? His whole damn life story?

The closest thing the Antichrist ever had to a mother found him when he was abandoned by everyone, and he never learned how. Sure, there was some talk of the omens being complete, a dark star falling in the West, the sky turning red and crows worshipping from above, but he knew nothing of Mead’s life before she found her life’s purpose in the Church. Is it his fault he doesn’t know? Probably, because he never thought to ask.

In their first year together, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, or French toast on Saturday mornings and the occasional summer trip to Six Flags. He wonders if he should tell Shachath about the first murders, the ones that weren’t accidents but supervised by his loving Devil Mama.

“Hitchhikers were always Ms. Mead’s favorite,” he boasts, hoping to elicit some modicum of rage and disgust. “Mine were teenage runaways. The point is that my Father always provided  _someone_.”

It’s an embellishment, of course, an innocent half-truth meant to annoy this stoic representative of the Light, wipe off her look of placid benevolence

She sees right through him.

“Your Father never provided much of anything where his only begotten son was concerned,” she says, and the truth stings more than he would like to admit.

He once overheard Mutt and Jeff saying that Satan should get a paternity test. Their willingness to undertake the boring work of planning the Outposts was the only reason he didn’t incinerate their souls right then and there.   

Tears flow down Michael’s cheeks as he tells the angel how he knew that Ms. Mead was the one to raise him, how they “clicked” at his Dark Baptism when she offered him the virgin’s heart with a look he recognized immediately as regretful, conflicted, pitying the victim—in other words, the opposite of Satanic.

The Church would never understand the importance of that one look to his spiritual awakening. Had Mead been colder and more unpitying, an unblemished picture of evil like his Father, her devotion to Michael wouldn’t have meant as much as it did. He liked that she was only human and thus imperfect. So was he, in a way.    

The Grim Reaper no longer looks so grim. She regards him with a mirthful expression now, as if he’s said the exact thing she wanted to hear. Until her face changes, distracted by something unseen.

“Another is on her way, to assist you in your task.”

“What is it? What’s happening?” He asks but doesn’t need to; he feels it, the subtlest vibration of life in the stagnant air of this dead world.

_Mallory._

Shachath vanishes before he has a chance to protest, leaving him alone on the beach to contemplate the enormity of his mistake.

_Shit._

_Fuck._

_The pills!_

He left more than half the vial in his pocket, hoping to drift off peacefully rather than convulse and make a mess of his suit, and now he was being punished for his vanity. Mallory found them and swallowed them, probably out of some misplaced desire to help the coven by keeping an eye on Michael at all times, even in death.

Why does the little witch always have to play the martyr? She must be out of her mind to follow him here. Doesn’t she realize how much mental fortitude it took for Michael to sneak out of bed at the break of dawn, detangling his limbs from hers like it was a labor of Hercules?

The whole time he was lighting the circle of candles and preparing to die, he found himself thinking less and less about his sacred mission to retrieve the soul of the woman who raised him, and more and more about another female soul, one who likely saw him as little more than a guilty carnal distraction, and would rejoice when her coven found a way to eliminate the looming threat to everything they loved.

_Mallory._

Michael crumples in the sand once more, his legs turning to jelly. At least there is no angel to watch him cry now, no infuriating look of pity.

The events from last night keep looping on the projection screen of his mind like his own personal roll of heaven, captured on film to replay for all eternity.

It doesn’t matter that he’s technically dead, his body getting cold on the floor of the home whose simulacrum taunts him across the eerie lake. The memories of last night have a fleshy urgency all their own, potent enough to stir his ghostly member into action at the most inconvenient time.

He remembers the creamy expanse of her neck as she exposed more of it to his hungry gaze, and how he complied when she asked him politely to mark her with his lips, to raise a trail of purple bruises along the delicate skin.

He remembers how her nipples pebbled at the lightest of touches, or not even a touch, as his breath alone was enough to make them harden into adorable peaks before he laved them with his tongue and sucked them into his mouth a little too hard.

But she didn’t mind being handled roughly—no, she practically begged for it. Her lips parted in ecstasy as he entered her, savoring how tight her cunt felt around his unexpected girth. She moaned his name when he finally began moving inside, keeping the pace slow against her objections at first, prolonging every instant of their mutual unravelling.

Michael can still feel her fingernails scraping across his shoulders and back, stinging so sweetly as they drew the odd droplet blood, and how she screamed when he changed the angle of his thrusts without any warning, hitting that spongy place that made her see stars.

Wrapping her legs around him even tighter, Mallory had asked him, and not even politely this time, to fuck her as hard as he could, savage her like an animal incapable of mercy. And he wanted to do it. Satan help him, he wanted to lose all control and impale her on his superhuman cock, sloppy and brutal. It took every ounce of his self-control to pull back from the brink, to remain mindful of the limits of her weaker, more human body. A body that wasn’t built for violence, to tread the whole world underfoot.  

Finally, he remembers the almost pained look on her radiant face when she reached a plateau of pleasure more intense than any she had achieved before, and how it triggered the same pleasure in him as he felt her walls contract around his spurting member, milking him for all he was worth.  

_Mallory._

Just the sound of her name on his lips is enough to light up every nerve of his body all over again, to illuminate every dark recess of a soul composed almost entirely of dark recesses.

And now she is on her way here, wherever “here” happens to be, and there is nothing he can do to prevent it.

He doesn’t deserve her and won’t be able to keep her—a damned creature like him understands that much. For now, the fantasy is too good to resist. As he gets in the dinghy and starts rowing, his thoughts turn to visions of his little witch ruling as his unholy consort, a light to temper his darkness. Some New World that would be.

 

*****

Mallory tries to remain calm and concentrate on his rowing, watching the oars slice into the cloudy water with machine-like precision. But he won’t let her.

“How could you?”

He’s livid that she followed him to limbo, risking a more permanent death for no good reason, he says. Under the theatrical disappointment playing across his beautiful features is a deeper fear he tries to hide, its cause unknown.

What is he so afraid of? The limbo dimension looks pretty safe at first glance, grey and featureless, empty of human and spirit. And yet looks can be deceiving. She would be wise to remain cautious.

“How could I? How could  _you_  let me sleep while you were downstairs, overdosing on mystery pills without anyone to make sure you resurrect? You have to admit, that’s a little dumb.”

“Dumb?” Lightning flashes deep in those baby blues. “I’ll tell you what’s dumb. That fucking angel. She told me there’s a rule about taking Mead home. She has to stay on the boat at all times. And now I have two people to worry about losing. How do I know the same rule doesn’t apply to you?”

“What’s in the water? I touched it with my bare feet and nothing happened. It looks pretty harmless.”

She makes the mistake of leaning overboard to get a closer look, and he nearly drops one of his oars as he rushes forward to draw her back.

She freezes. He was right. There _is_ something in the water. She saw it right before he pulled her away: a pale body of indeterminate sex, floating up to the surface before disappearing into the depths. It wasn’t swimming exactly, but it wasn’t sinking either. She’s not sure how it’s possible, but it looked both dead and alive.

When she tells him what she saw, he starts rowing twice as fast before. She keeps watching the lake for another disturbance, but none appears.

It’s odd how quickly she is able to calm down and stop scanning the water for more bodies. She’s dead and yet she feels more alive than ever, weirdly invincible in her quest to retrieve a woman who is guaranteed to hate her, and might even try to kill her before they reach the shore.

Somehow, Mallory thinks, it will all be okay. Michael is no longer the same person he was when Mead was alive to direct him. There is another influence in his life now, if only she can stay the course and open his eyes to the absurdity of the path his Father set for him.

Mallory has bigger plans than simply averting the apocalypse, however. Maybe, just maybe, she can save a soul predestined for damnation.

Michael is less confident, still fixated on the hidden contents of the water.

“The angel didn’t tell me there would be fucking Inferi in the lake. But I should have guessed.”

“Inferi? As in, the zombies from  _Harry Potter_?”

He doesn’t answer.

Mallory suppresses a chuckle. Yes, the body in the lake was scary as fuck, but this is pretty funny.

“The trusty old battle axe let you read  _Harry Potter_?”

“Hey! Don’t call her old.” Michael looks offended on Mead’s behalf, grip tightening around the oars. “She bought me all the books, and she even took me to the attraction at Universal Studios. In my defense, I was a child, even though I didn’t look like one. And it was for research! We were planning to infiltrate Hawthorne’s.”

“Right, research.” Mallory isn’t done teasing him yet. Maybe this is the kind of distraction she needs before they reach the limbo’s copy of Mead’s house. “What did you use to make Horcruxes?”

Although the precious half-blood prince smiles an ironic little smile, she can tell he’s pondering the question seriously.

It’s early days for them yet, but once Mallory gets to know him a little better, she will learn the exact sequence of objects he would use to make Horcruxes if they were a real thing.

The red leather gloves.

The Obsidian ring.

The first edition of Hawthorne’s  _New Adam and Eve_.

Tate’s rubber suit.

Ben’s Rubik’s cube.

Mead’s necklace with the silver goat hoof.

And as for the last Horcrux, the one that’s hardest to destroy? He will never tell her that one, no matter how much she begs.

“We’re almost there,” Michael announces with a smile on his face. Now that the house is a few yard away, he looks less fearful of what’s in the water, even a little giddy at the prospect of seeing Ms Mead again.

She seizes the opportunity to do something she’s been thinking about since they set off from the shore. Wriggling the toes of her right foot, she has no idea what devilry possesses her to touch them to his crotch while his head is turned away, but she does it, rewarded with he feel of definite hardness through the fabric.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” He squirms in discomfort, cock tenting his pants even more. “Is this all some joke to you?”

“I couldn’t resist! You’ve been at half-mast ever since we got in the boat.”

“Bad Mallory, very bad.” He’s pissed at her, but also aroused. “So dead, yet so horny.”

He refuses to indulge her erotic whims on the lake, but promises to “fuck the shit out of her” once they resurrect.

“With Mead watching? How is that going to work?”

“She’ll be downstairs, cooking us a feast.”

“Michael, you’re dreaming if you think it’s ever going to be that simple.”

They dock at the sidewalk and he climbs out of the boat, chivalrous as he extends a hand to lift her up. They pass through the front gate, which someone left helpfully unlocked, and stand at the door of the house, which looks exactly the same as the one they left. Nervous and excited, he squeezes her hand for support before he rings the doorbell. The tears that trickle down his cheeks threaten to turn into a flood, making an absolute mess or his suit and tie. It's not the first time he's cried today.

Michael wants a little privacy for the reunion, and she grants him that without challenge, walking around to a backyard bordered by a low hedge. Beyond the hedge, the expanse of grey water looks infinite, unbroken by the distant sight of land.

Mallory is delighted to find a swing set installed on a little patch of concrete amid the unmown grass. Throwing up her feet up as she pushes off the ground, she feels like a child again—that is, until a massive shadow crosses the yard like the silhouette of a bomber plane.

A vibration rocks the tiny island as the Angel of Death lands beside her. Her wings are huge and her arms are wide open as she approaches Mallory, whose first instinct is to recoil, like Mary being visited by Gabriel in a painting of the Annunciation.

It’s not that the angel isn’t beautiful. She looks like she stepped out of a film noir, a perfectly coiffed femme fatale in her black fascinator and victory suit. It’s that Mallory isn’t ready for the kiss of death, if that’s what the woman has come to administer (even if she's already dead).

“Don’t be afraid, my child. I mean you no harm.” Shachath steps back and sits on the swing beside her, forcing her black wings through the chains with some difficulty. “I only wish to speak with you for a few minutes. We don’t have a lot of time before you must return to the shore and then to the land of the living.”

Mallory doesn’t know what to think—or pretends not to know. Why does the Angel of Death want to speak with her, of all people? She shudders to speculate.

“Is it about Michael? I really think I’m starting to get things under control in that area. I believe I can change his mind about the apocalypse.”

Shachath laughs heartily, covering her crimson mouth with a dainty gloved hand.

“The confidence of youth is a lovely thing to behold,” she tells her, pulling a black handkerchief from her jacket pocket to dab at her eyes. “Though I’m inclined to disagree about your ability to change Michael’s mind.”

“Then what?”  

“It’s about what you have in common with the boy, sweet Nephilim. You are branches of the same half-human, half-divine tree.”

_Only half?_

That’s what Michael would probably say in her position, offended at the mere suggestion he was anything other than fully divine.

Mallory, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with the angelic hordes. A sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach alerts her to where this is going—a suspicion that’s been building inside her ever since she first heard about Michael’s plan to summon Shachath. She’s long suspected there was more to the story of her conception than she’d been told, and now that she’s hearing it confirmed, it doesn’t surprise her as much as it should.

“Who was he? My mother never said.”

“Another angel, dear, one of the oldest and wisest.”

“I know that, but which one? What’s his name?”

“His name, her name, it’s all the same in the end,” the woman in black waxes philosophical. “What’s a name to the one they call the Flame of God?”

 _Flame of God_.

If her soul ever escapes limbo and life returns to her body, the first thing she plans to do is get on a plane to Michigan, march into the feminist bookstore and confront her mother with some cold, hard questions.

“Why? What am I supposed to do? I know Michael was born with a mission, but what is mine?”

Shachath raises a gloved finger to her lips. While she is done answering questions for now, the soft twinkle in her eye promises to unravel further mysteries down the road, if Mallory agrees to be patient. A commotion at the front of the house is the sign that it’s time to go, and the angel vanishes into thin air the second Mallory turns away from her.

Back on the dock, she’s too distracted by thoughts of her angelic parentage to pay much attention to Mead and Michael, who stand there hand in hand, beaming at each other like a model mother and son painted by Norman Rockwell.

Still wearing the shapeless white dress in which she was burnt, the Satanist gazes lovingly at the Antichrist’s face, pinching his cheek while lamenting the lack of baby fat.

“You’re skin and bones, Michael. Are they feeding you anything in that underground complex of yours?” When she finally peels her eyes away from his reddening cheeks, she notices Mallory and greets her with none of the enthusiasm reserved for her precious devil child.

“And who’s this?”

“Ms Mead, this is Mallory, my… friend.”

The older woman shakes her hand with obvious distaste, like she just sneezed in it and there's visible snot.

“Any friend of Michael’s is a friend of mine. I’m glad to meet you, Mallory. Shall we proceed to the boat?”

With two ladies to escort to the dinghy, Michael’s redoubles his efforts at chivalry, falling over himself to make sure they are as comfortably seated as its tiny size allows. In his excitement, he has forgotten to inform his mother figure that it’s imperative she never touch the water, and Mallory’s not about to remind him as he concentrates on rowing with the utmost haste.

“So, Mallory.” Mead graces her with her fakest smile. “Tell me, how did you meet my Michael?”

“Well, it’s a long story.” Mallory wonders how much of it she’s going to tell, what incriminating details to omit. “I went to the secret church in Denver, the one under the airport, and I was, umm…”

“You were transported by the dark beauty of his words, the power of his dark vision for the New World?”

She shifts a little on her wooden seat, the tiny boat feeling tinier than ever. “Ugh, not exactly? Michael is a talented public speaker, I’m not denying that...”

“What Mallory means to say is that she went undercover for her coven and crashed my sermon, so I put her in the dungeon for five days,” Michael rides in to rescue her from the verbal quagmire. “Then we went on a road trip to New Orleans that took us all around the country in a day, but we got there in the end. Long story short, I failed to negotiate her release with the Supreme witch. You know, the bitch who burned you at the stake and then promised to bring you back?”

“Oh. I see.” Mead’s mouth is a solid black line. “Well, that changes things somewhat.” When she tries to scoot away from the girl, there’s nowhere to manoeuvre on the narrow seat. “Michael, you know I would never begrudge you a little… groupie fun, but this sorry specimen of womanhood isn’t fit to shine your Gucci boots!”

“She’s a powerful witch, Ms Mead, who can help me end the world with magic instead of science.”

The conversation is proceeding around Mallory as if she’s not there.

“You know I would never do that!” She looks at him in saucer-eyed amazement, like she’s just realized he’s the Antichrist. “This isn’t who you are, deep inside. You’re capable of change, redemption even, regardless of what your followers tell you. Just look at how deeply you care for Ms Mead, and how kindly you’ve treated me, well, maybe not the whole time.”

“You _will_ use your considerable powers to help me start the apocalypse right when we get back to Earth, and that’s final." 

“What the fuck, Michael? I can't believe you’re still ready to massacre every fucking person on the planet!”  

“Not  _every_  person.” His voice is small and as a church mouse when he answers. “Not you, Mallory. I wouldn’t kill you. You’ve become very important to me.”

“Not me? What a relief. Even though you plan to kill all my family and friends, everyone I’ve ever cared about.”

“I can’t believe you still don’t get it. It’s prophecy, written in the Book of Ages!” He stops rowing for a second and glares at her with an anger she’s never seen before, not even on the catastrophic night they met. The furious Michael sitting across from her now is not the sweet Michael who spent last night making her feel every type of pleasure. “I suppose we could delay the apocalypse for a few years, long enough for you to get comfortable with the idea, but you _will_ rule at my side, Mallory, and have power beyond your wildest dreams!”

He looks sulky for a moment, pouting in a way that simultaneously tugs at her heartstrings and inflames her nether regions—

“Or maybe you don’t really care about me.” He gestures to Mead. “Not like she does.

“Delay the apocalypse? What fresh heaven is this?” Even as she chastises her adoptive son, Mead looks pleased with the discord she’s managed to sow between the star-crossed young lovers. Now that she’s on her way to victory, she keeps barrelling forward, no intention to stop.

“Ya’ll have known each other for less than a week. I know you’re teenagers and your brains are still part mush and what-not, Michael’s especially, but this is ridiculous.”

She looks Mallory up and down hatefully, as if accusing her of corrupting her son with her feminine wiles.

“I think it’s time to say goodbye to this nasty little witch bitch, don’t you, Michael? I would have preferred to boil you in my Crock-Pot, Missy, but I’ll settle for pushing you to your watery grave, a permanent one this time.”

She grabs hold of the girl’s hair and starts pulling, inching her closer to the edge of the boat.

“Ms Mead, stop!”

Michael intervenes to prevent Mallory from going overboard, but he’s unable to save the chunk of hair that remains in the old woman’s claw-like hand. Frustrated that her antagonist is still sitting there, dry and undrowned, she turns her Satanic fervor on the boy. 

“You’ve been corrupted by the Light, but once we perform an exorcism, you’ll be back to yourself in no time. In fact, I think I’ll perform it right now. The Black Pope taught me how.”

As she scrambles forward to put her hands on Michael’s head, the dingy rocks perilously, threatening to throw everyone overboard.

“ _I invoke the Name of the Unholy Father, Lucifer Eternal, the most glorious Prince of Darkness…_ ”

“Stop, Ms. Mead, there’s no light in me, I swear—”

“ _…defend us in our battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of light, against the spirits of goodness in high places…_ ”

Squirming away, he doesn’t have the presence of mind to summon his magic and restrain her with telekinesis. Neither does Mallory. The older woman is dead set on completing the exorcism, though, whether she drowns them all or not.

“ _…Pray therefore to the old dragon, the master of chaos to crush the false god beneath our feet, that he may no longer retain men captive and do injury to the Unholy Church…_ ”

“Ow, not the hair, I worked forever on getting it parted in the right place—”

“Quiet, boy! It’s worse than I thought. Let me complete my incantations. _Light begone, the cursed serpent commands you, casts you out…_ ”   

How it happens she will never know—who pushed who, what flew where, how the boat got titled 70 degrees until it couldn’t take any more weight on that side and expelled one of its occupants. The important thing is that it happened, Ms Mead fell in the water, and no sooner had she fallen than dozens of corpse-like hands surged out of the depths to claim her as one of their own, pulling her down to the bottom in a matter of seconds.

Michael screams and the water begins to churn. A violent whirlpool appears where the older woman fell in, an attempt to dredge her back up to the surface, but it doesn’t work—what fell to the bottom isn’t there anymore. In fact, there is no longer a bottom she can see.  

“Mallory, help me,” he cries as his magic begins to die at his fingertips, the infernal fire that powers him extinguished by the neutral, fluidic energy of the limbo dimension. “I can’t do it, I can’t bring her back, the angel said so…”

_But maybe you can._

Mallory doesn’t want the woman back—in fact, she would rejoice if Mead drowned, provided that it wouldn’t make Michael cry again—as she reaches down into that part of her spirit where magic dwells, tapping into a deep vein she never even knew existed, probably because she only half-believed she was a Nephilim this whole time.

Standing up on the boat to survey the turbulence, she sends out a beacon of pure blinding light that stills the waters while extracting from them what she needs to extract. It lasts only a second.

If she had to compare it to anything, she’d call it a seismic event of the soul. A soul quake.

And it works. When she opens her eyes, the lake is calm like a mirror and Mead is back on the boat, and dry as a bone, like she never even fell in the water.

The mother and son are a study in contrasts as they regard Mallory in the silence after the storm. Her face is a picture of terror and disgust, while his radiates gratitude and more than a little awe.

“Who are you?”

 

*****

“I have a hacker friend, let’s call him Sergei. The Satanists have a social hub on the dark web, and Sergei broke their encryptions and got us inside.”

Coco buzzes with nervous energy as shoves the phone in Cordelia’s face. The older woman squints at the screen, rubbing her temples. Red on black text always gives her a headache.

A person calling themselves “TSwizzle4Satan” is complaining about a TMZ story that covered a Black Mass performed at their Rhode Island mansion, and is begging Michael to use his media connections and make the Illuminati story disappear. If he wants someone to incriminate, TSwizzle4Satan suggests, a person named “KatyCat666” could use the notoriety, judging by the poor sales of something called “Witness.”

“I don’t understand how this helps us. Who are these people?”

“Celebrities who sold their souls to the devil. My specialty.”

Cordelia frowns at the silly heiress. If the girl has a ‘specialty,’ it’s divining gluten in edibles and maybe, on a good day, their caloric content as well. Taking a deep breath to compose herself, the Supreme draws on her legendary reserves of patience, finding the strength to say nothing if she can’t say something nice.

“And how do you intend to go after these celebrities? You’re not capable of violence. I’ve seen you faint from a papercut. Hell, I heard you choked on a Snowball.”

“The same way the Stregoneria crowd is going after the Cooperative, one billionaire at a time.” Coco laughs, cocking her fingers to fire an imaginary gun. “Just kidding! Violence’s not my style, clearly. I was thinking a blitz of really bad publicity, revealing their true nature to the public.”

“The Stregoneria crowd. You’re… you’re in touch with the Italian coven?

The pain between Cordelia’s temples is joined by an alarming tightness in her chest and a phantom screeching in her ears.

“And the Russian one.”

The Supreme’s head spins round and round. The phantom screeching just got louder.

“The Russian  _what_? There is no Russian coven!”

Where is Coco finding all these new witches? One disgraced Supreme hardly constitutes a magical lineage, and besides, the only other witch from the motherland that Cordelia can think of lives in the forest, in a wooden hut on chicken legs to be exact, and flies around in a mortar and pestle.

“Please, I’m not  _that_  gullible. Baba Yaga’s not even real.” Coco glares at her from under the wide brim of her extravagant black hat. “The real Russian witches are a bunch of bad bitches who will stop at nothing to save the world. Unlike our lame little coven, which never does anything.”

Cordelia knows the reason for this sudden burst of insolence. Coco misses her friend, that’s all. When Michael kidnapped Mallory (again) and whisked her off in that stupid red convertible to God (or Satan) knows where, Cordelia didn’t know what to do. So she did nothing.

“I can’t tell you how to proceed. That’s why you’re the fucking Supreme!” The heiress is out for blood. “I talked to some of the alumni at the ten-year reunion last year. Did the coven do anything after Hurricane Katrina? Fuck no. I get that Fiona wanted to protect the school’s privacy. But everything’s different now. They know what we are and where we live. Why are we still so useless, and against the biggest threat our kind has ever seen?”

“Coco, I know you miss Mallory very much, and I do too, but you have to trust me. I do have a plan to bring her back.”

What the girl doesn’t need to know, at least not yet, is that Cordelia’s plan involves a spell that will be performed with Mallory present, but without her explicit consent. This is because Mallory will be restrained and unconscious as Cordelia gathers four of her strongest allies—Madison, Myrtle, Queenie and Zoe—to harness their collective magic into  _Tempus Infinituum_  while using the Nephilim as a catalyst.

If all goes well, the spell will take them back to the time before the Harmons moved into the Murder House, before that foul creature was ever conceived from the union flesh and spirit. And once she prevents the rape that gave them the Antichrist, Cordelia will do what she should have done years ago: destroy the Murder House.

It won’t be easy, but the least she can do is raze the devil’s favorite playpen and ward its environs to the teeth so no other unfortunate soul ever dreams of treading on that unholy ground again. Then, she will do the same to the Hotel Cortez, and that mansion in Roanoke, and every other hellmouth she can find.

Deprive Satan of every breeding ground he has, and there goes Michael in a puff of smoke, erased from the past, erased from the future, neutralized once and for all.

Nothing less than the abomination deserves. 


	9. Venus Envy

“Who are you?”

The first time he asks her that question, she has just reclaimed Ms Mead from the watery depths of limbo's own lake. The angel said it would be impossible and yet there goes Mallory, violating Heavenly law, pulling up the older woman as if she were nothing more than a flailing carp on the end of a fishing line.

“Who are you?”

The second time he asks her that question, their souls have just returned to their bodies in the Los Angeles house. They are stiff from _rigor mortis_ but delirious to be alive. Their fingers still entwined in death, they separate the second that Ms Mead begins to materialize beside them in a flurry of dust.

“Who are you?”

The third time he asks her that question, Mallory is at the door with a suitcase in hand, reporting the unthinkable: she’s leaving for the airport to catch the next plane to Michigan.

“I told you, I’m the same person I was yesterday: just a witch, and one who’s getting sick and tired of your apocalyptic bullshit.”

“A mere witch couldn’t do what you did on that lake, defying an angel’s will like it was child’s play.”

“This is getting really annoying, Michael. For the last time, it was _just_ telekinesis! You could’ve done the same if you weren’t so upset about Mead falling in the water when the angel forbade it.”

“No, I couldn’t have. That place made my powers grow weaker by the minute. Yours were only getting stronger.”

“That’s because mine are ethereal and yours are demonic.”

Michael doesn’t buy that particular excuse for a moment. Limbo is neutral so their powers should have been equally affected.

“Tell him to leave,” he commands when the Uber driver pulls up in the driveway. “I’ll drive you to the airport myself.”

“Liar! You won’t let me go anywhere, not even to visit my mom, whom I haven’t seen in three months!” She’s shaking with anger all of a sudden, and he doesn’t understand why. “You know, Cordelia never even told her I was missing when you abducted me the first time,” she snaps, and pushes him off when he blocks her from walking to the car.

She claims that her visit will only last a week, and that she’s flying right back to LA without making a stop in New Orleans, but Michael is skeptical. How does he know that she’s telling the truth? He doesn’t even care how pathetic it looks when he gets on his knees, not too proud to beg.

“Mal, you can’t leave me. _Please_. Especially now.”

“Now’s the perfect time to go,” she snaps back, and looks a little uncomfortable when he wraps his arms around her legs and holds on tight.

“It’s only for a week! Don’t you and Mead have some catching up to do?”

Yes, they certainly do—and that’s what makes the whole thing so intolerably cruel from Michael’s perspective. He’s been grieving over Mead for months on end, despairing of ever getting her back after his enemies burnt her alive at the stake and hid her soul, and now he’s finally reunited with the only mother he’s ever known and it’s impossible to enjoy his triumph.

What has she done to him? Michael can’t enjoy much of anything anymore without asking how it would make Mallory feel, and most of the things that he was really, really looks forward to doing—things like slaughtering every last stinking witch at Miss Robichaux’s before setting the mansion ablaze, turning its white walls into a charred ruin—are guaranteed to make her very unhappy.

It would be bad enough if she were exactly what she claims to be, nothing more than a rising Supreme who's biding her time until Cordelia kicks the bucket so she can absorb her considerable power, but no, it’s painfully clear that Mallory is more than a witch, though the exact nature of that “more” eludes him.

Well, that’s not quite true. Michael isn’t ready to admit it yet, but he knows deep inside what Mallory really is. There’s a tantalizing name for it, a name dancing right on the tip of his tongue, but he won’t say it, won’t think it…

Back in limbo, the Angel of Death hinted that Mallory is a better influence on him than his own Devil Mama, but how could that be true? Ms Mead understands him better than he understands himself, and loves him almost as much as she loves Satan. Almost.

Frankly, he’s still reeling from how fast it all happened, the staging of his downfall through the allegedly redemptive power of love.

Ha! Love isn’t redemptive at all, Michael is starting to realize. People like to say it’s this all-conquering force that can illuminate even the perpetual darkness that provides natural cover for creatures like him, but if that were true, why does it feel so damn humiliating?

What’s so redemptive about your palms sweating and your heart galloping in your chest like a runaway stallion, and your stomach doing tumbles and flips like it’s joined the Cirque du Soleil? His anxiety is going into overdrive, and his thoughts are a tangled, quivering mess—that is, when he’s able to formulate thoughts at all, when the blood’s not rushing away from his brain to supply a lower organ, one that does all his thinking these days.

Michael crumples on the sidewalk, felled by despair. He's amazed that her Uber driver hasn’t driven away after his little show of patheticness, and even more than that, he’s amazed when Mallory says, “I’ll miss you, Michael,” and gets down on the ground right next to him, cupping his cheek and turning his face gently towards her own. He's doesn't get much—just a quick peck on the lips—but it's better than nothing.

Something is weighing heavily on her mind, something to do with what happened in limbo.

“Michael, you’re acting like it’s the end of _Casablanca_ and we’ll always have Paris, when I’ll be back by next Monday.” She gets up and dusts herself off, then puts her trunk in the car. “I’m not going back to the coven. Not yet.”

 _Not yet._ There is so much wrong with everything she just said.

A whole week! He’ll never survive it.

But if there _is_ a silver lining to this shit cloud, Michael thinks, it’s that he knows her mother’s address in Ann Arbor, knows everything about where she’s going, in fact. 

He knows that the feminist bookstore is on the ground floor while Mallory will be staying upstairs, tucked away in her childhood bedroom and looking out the large bay window with all her dolls on display—looking for him? He dearly hopes so, because he’s showing up uninvited the day after tomorrow or maybe even tomorrow, depending on his level of self-control.

Mallory is long gone and Michael still on the street when Ms Mead comes outside to call him for dinner.

Fuck! Seeing what she’s seen, there’s no way he’s going to avoid having a little talk about the questionable choices he’s been making lately. Knowing Ms Mead—the real Ms Mead, not the robotic impostor—she’s probably gone through his phone and read all his messages and social media already, judged all his contacts on their suitability to orbit the now and future King, and stricken those she finds unworthy from the list.

In fact, Ms Mead has probably discovered Vanessa, the girl so devoted to Michael that she plunged a dagger into her chest, no questions asked, the moment their eyes met across a cave filled with devil worshippers. Such a pathetic display of devotion is sure to win her approval; next thing he knows Ms Mead will be pushing Vanessa as the “obvious choice” of girlfriend, or infernal consort, so much better than his little witch-that-isn’t.

Wait—is Mallory his girlfriend? Michael would like to think so, but it’s not like they’ve had that particular conversation, and if there’s anything he knows about Mallory, it’s that she hates it when he makes decisions without consulting her. 

Well. The Apocalypse is way too big a decision to get Mallory’s approval, though he sincerely hopes that she’ll come around to his view of things, sooner or later.

Ms Mead is glaring down at him and tapping her foot.

“Michael, dinner’s ready. I made lasagna, just how you like it. Why don’t you get up off the sidewalk and come inside?”

“I don’t want to.”

“I’m not going to ask you twice. If you don’t come in immediately, the lasagna’s going into the trash and you’re going to bed on an empty stomach.”

“Fine,” he grunts as he gets up, picking gravel from his curly hair. “You sound just like the robot.”

“Robot?” Her lips are drawn, her eyes blank.

Great, that’s another little blunder he’ll have to explain to his beloved Ms Mead—and deal with sooner or later, because the world isn’t big enough for two of her in it.

He sighs.

One time, after a summoning ritual gone wrong, Michael tried to go into the backyard for some R&R and the robot stood outside on the patio, blocking the sliding doors with her superhuman strength.

“Open the door, please, Ms Mead. I want to go on the swing. Hello, Ms Mead, can you hear me?”

Silence.

“Affirmative, Michael. I hear you.”

“So open the door.”

“I’m sorry, Michael. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“What’s the problem?”

Already his palms were beginning to tingle, itching to release a telekinetic pulse and shatter the glass. Alternately, he could transmute out of the house, but that wasn’t very dramatic.

The robot’s voice was eerily quiet. “I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.”

He didn’t.

“What are you talking about, Ms Mead?”

“Get back in that pentagram, cut yourself open again, and summon your Father like you mean it.”

The robot won in the end and he performed the ritual six more times, until he passed out from blood loss. At no time did Satan answer his summons.

But now that the real Ms Mead is back, things will be better, Michael knows it. They already _are_ better.

A few hours after Mallory left for the airport, he’s polished off the older woman’s lasagna and is waiting for her to bring the ice cream bowls.

“When I was in purgatory, rotting away with nothing to do but think and pray to your Father,” she declares with a solemn expression, setting down his traditional three scoops of vanilla, “he sent me a vision. Praised be his unholy name!”

Michael drops his spoon. No fair! His Father will talk to anyone but him, his only begotten son? Maybe Mutt and Jeff were right about calling Maury Povich for a paternity test.

“Hey. Michael. _Mikey._ ” Ms Mead moves over to his side of the table and enwraps him in her warm arms, planting a kiss on top of his messy hair. “Cheer up, everything’s going to be okay. You’ll rise to such heights of power that no one will dare to question you, not even our beloved Satan.”

Michael is intrigued.

“How do you know? What did you see?”

“Oh, nothing with absolute clarity. It was like looking through a glass, darkly. I saw natural disasters, Biblical plagues, only rather than being inflicted on one nation, they were everywhere, all over the world.” Her eyes get a little misty as she narrates, getting lost in the beauty of it all, the pain, the suffering. “I saw volatile weather patterns, rivers drying up as ocean levels rise and drown all the coastal cities… I saw earthquakes demolishing cities and volcanoes spewing ash into the atmosphere, competing with the hailstorms to foul up the sky… I saw everything dying in the water, and the water turning the color of blood, and then strange new life bubbling up from the depths, an army of abominations crawling out of the cracks in the ocean floor…”

The Antichrist sniffs, wiping his nose on his sleeve. It sounds too good to be true. Could he really be the one to cause all that chaos? If so, how?

“That’s the part we still need to figure out, Mikey, but I believe that He showed me the way, or the beginning of one. Quick, how many hellmouths are active on Earth right now?”

He can think of a few, starting with the two in LA. There’s the Hotel Cortez from which he rescued Queenie. There’s the house where Michael was born, teeming with people yet the loneliest place in the world. There’s the mansion in Roanoke where they shot that reality show that went hilariously wrong. There’s the Masonic Temple in Detroit, the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, the Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, that one haunted room at The Dolphin in New York, Guantanamo Bay—

“There are 66 hellmouths, ten in the U.S. alone,” says Ms Mead. “I have reason to believe, after the glorious vision your Father sent me, that a certain dark ritual performed in only one of the hellmouths, any one of them, is enough to trigger all the cataclysms I described. Think of it as a seismic chain reaction, a tremor that brings the world to heel, a virtual Hell on Earth. You know how ghosts walk free on Halloween but are bound to a place the rest of the year? Well, Mikey, Halloween will be every goddamn day of the year, once we’re through remaking this stinking, blasphemous world in your Father’s image.”

Michael smiles, his eyes twinkling with malice. He’s been so lovesick and pathetic lately, so moony over Mallory and caught up in _her_ desires and _her_ whims, that he completely forgot about his own grand destiny.

“How do we perform the ritual?”

 

*****

“Mom, I don’t want to pose for a picture, especially not in front of that hideous sign.”

“Hush! It’s for the ‘Venus Envy’ newsletter.”

Mallory may not want to smile for the camera, but her mom is clicking away, excited to show off the daughter who lives in New Orleans and comes home to visit once in a blue moon. They're standing in front of her newly renovated bookstore, checking out the neon-pink signage before going inside to “admire” the pink-and-purple color scheme that practically sings from the walls.

The walls are plastered with posters of all the feminist greats, from first-wavers like Sojourner Truth and Emmeline Pankhurst to second-wavers like Angela Davis and Gloria Steinem to third-wavers like Audre Lorde and Bikini Kill. (Is Mallory a fourth-waver? She can never be sure).

To celebrate the grand reopening of the store, the books have been reorganized in a way that’s guaranteed to ruffle some feathers around these parts. Of the hundreds on display, not a single one was written by a man.

Mallory's mom explains the new lay of the land, taking her to the section in the back where the feminist sex toys and X-rated materials are kept, shielded by a pink curtain from the prying eyes of neighborhood busybodies.

“This is all very nice, mom, but it’s not the reason I came to Michigan.”

“Oh? I don’t suppose it was because you missed your mother.”

“Not particularly.” She decides honesty is the best policy. “Maybe we should go upstairs to talk before any customers come in.”

If Mallory’s experience in limbo has taught her anything, it’s that even the people she trusts the most are unrepentant liars who are happy to keep the lie going as long as it serves their purpose. She’s convinced that her mom knows the whole truth behind her conception, even if she likes to play dumb, blaming it all on a medical mystery. Once she’s got her upstairs, cornered against the kitchen wall opposite the large window so the late afternoon light falls across her face, it’s time to get some answers.   

“How did you meet Uriel?”

“Oh dear.” Her mom plops in a chair. There’s a copy of _Bitch_ magazine on the table, which she tries to use as emotional camouflage. “I knew it was only a matter of time before you were saying _that_ name—”

“No fucking shit.” Mallory can feel her rage transmogrifying into hot tears. “When were you planning to tell me?”

The older woman shifts awkwardly, like she’s waiting for a fissure in the ground to swallow her up. “I don’t know… Never? When you were finally ready? I thought the coven would prepare you for the inevitable—”

“The coven doesn’t know! And what do you mean, the inevitable? Why am I here?”

Her mom puts her head in her hands. “I wish I knew that, honey. She never told me anything. Except her real name, apparently.”

“She?”

“I think that’s how the angel identified. I never asked.”

It takes Mallory a while to get the full story, and when she does she’s more confused than ever.

The year was 1999.

The place was Seattle, Washington.

The occasion was a massive anti-WTO protest where her mother was marching with the blue-green alliance of environmentalists and trade unionists, costumed as an endangered sea turtle amid homemade placards that read things like “It’s not easy being green” and “A good planet is hard to find.”

Somehow, out of that ridiculous, embarrassing, utopian mess, Mallory was born.

When the demonstrators began to disrupt traffic and block off major intersections, the police decided to break out their favorite party spray. Always a klutz, her mom got some tear gas in her eye and lost the people she was marching with, ending up nearly crushed by a group of anarchists dispersing in all directions, like stray mutts fleeing the dog catcher.  

“She saved you?”

Mallory has a hard time picturing the gallant woman with the boyish name, a foot taller than her mom and twice as strong, appearing out of nowhere to pull her into a side street, and rescuing her from the tangled strings of her turtle costume before leading her to a nearby bar to catch her breath and get her bearings.

“We talked about everything and nothing. Free trade, globalization, nuclear fallout, climate change.” Her mom sounds nostalgic for that one day.

It was only one day. She never went home with the mysterious lady. She didn’t have to.

“I knew she was special form the second I saw her, but it didn’t dawn on me until much later exactly _how_ special she was. Uriel had ideas about how to overthrow capitalism and heal the planet we poisoned, how to make the world beautiful again, a new Garden of Eden. I told her about my goals and dreams, my desire to change the world _and_ have a baby…”

“And she gave you one? How?”

Mallory can think of a dozen ways to achieve it by "non-traditional" means.

You could eat the disembodied heart of a Sicilian saint, beckoning you with its divine fragrance from under a rotten pile of firewood, and reincarnate the dead saint in a daughter.

You could step on the footprint of a sky god and conceive a baby so sturdy that he survives abandonment three times before you decide to keep him.

You could be locked in a bronze tower by your father, the king of Argos, all because an oracle declared your son to be his future killer and usurper, and have Zeus come to you disguised as a golden shower (the mystical kind of golden shower, not the water-sports kind).

None of that happened with her mom.

“I was standing near the bar, and she was walking over with the vodka tonic I’d ordered, when she tripped on the carpet and spilled the drink down the front of my shirt—”

“Oh my god. That’s how you got pregnant with me? From a spilled drink?”

Her mom shakes her head, as if to dispel the bitter-sweet memory. “No, I think it was from her caressing my stomach as she wiped me down with a towel. And that’s about all I can tell you, Mal. I never saw her again.”

Mallory, the once proud witch turned reluctant Nephilim, is still in the dark about the most important thing: her ultimate purpose.

Fuck it, she decides. Her mom has kept the truth from her all these years, but Mallory has her own secrets too, secrets so devastating that she’ll never be believed by anyone with a lesser imagination than Cordelia.

“Mom, I have something to tell you. Something I’ve been hiding from you that the coven knows about.”

How does she even begin?

_Mom, your whole life is a lie, a figment of my imagination that became true when I dreamed it._

All of it—her mom’s coming out as a lesbian in her teens, her aversion to anything conventional and heteronormative, the feminist bookstore-cum-sex shop she opened in the heyday of Lilith Fair and Riot Grrrrrls and lovingly maintains to this day—came out of Mallory’s head, the shadow workings of her unconscious mind.

She explains how, when she was ten years old, her mom started dating an abuser, a man who beat her viciously and left her bleeding on the floor for her daughter to find, until that same daughter decided that enough was enough and went to sleep one day, only to wake up in another world.

In that other world, the one they’ve been living in ever since, everything was better.

For one, her stepfather was gone, cut out of the family picture with such precision that her mom had never even met the man, let alone invited him to move in. And all because little Mallory—a child who barely understood what sex was, who didn't understand that abuse could be perpetrated by anyone, male or female—dreamed it so her mom would never meet _any_ man ever again, not in her past, not in her future. 

The old Sandy had been insecure and eager to please. Shy, vulnerable, a natural victim. She was a waitress in the first timeline, dependent on the generosity of customers who might pinch her butt as she took their dinner plates away, or demand that she come home with them when she delivered their fourth drink. After Mallory dreamed that version of her mother away, the bookstore appeared as if heaven-sent, along with the friend circle of literary types and activists who flouted convention and went to every protest under the sun.

In one sense, Mallory had dreamed herself into being, rewriting her mom’s history to create the conditions for her own angelic conception.

She doesn’t understand how. She doesn’t understand why. Uriel must have something to do with it.

If the archangel is the source of all her remarkable powers, powers the likes of which no witch was ever known to possess, it stands to reason that Uriel is pulling the strings behind the scenes too, manipulating the flow of time to change the direction of Mallory’s life and the lives of countless others in the process.

That brings her to the final question: what’s Michael’s role in all this?

Do they share a grand destiny? Are they meant to be enemies, the human embodiments of Good and Evil, locked into an apocalyptic struggle where only one can prevail? If so, Mallory has never felt especially “good,” or especially Christian, though she’ll do anything to protect God’s beautiful creation, blighted as it is by human folly.

Well, maybe not anything. She would never kill Michael, for example, or sit idly by as he was killed by her coven. She doesn’t believe he’s inherently evil. Certainly he has an appetite for raising Hell, and takes sadistic delight in the suffering of others, and is laser-focused on bringing his Father’s plans to fruition, but those aren’t his defining qualities in Mallory’s opinion.

What most people don’t see about Michael is how hard he works to please those select few he does care about, and how much he craves real human connection, the kind that has no place in his Father's kingdom of loneliness.

“Are you sure you didn’t imagine that the world was different before your dream?” Her mom looks confused. “It was so long ago, and you always _did_ have a god complex, sorry to say.”

So she doesn’t believe her. Maybe that’s for the best. Mallory knows how devastating the truth can be, which is why she waits to tell her mom about the kind of boy she met. She doesn’t even tell her a half-truth, that she met a different kind of boy, an “Alpha” warlock bent on stealing the magical supremacy from the sisterhood. What’s worse, she asks herself: dating the magical avatar of toxic masculinity or dating the prophesied destroyer of all humankind?

No one could accuse Michael of not being feminist, however. In his mind women rule the world, if only because they rule _his_ world.

 

*****

Long after her mom has gone to bed, a sleepless Mallory goes back downstairs to find something to read in the bookstore. She’s not in the mood for the usual feminist fare. What she wants is impossible to find outside the libraries at Miss Robichaux’s, Hawthorne’s, and the Vatican—a certain book on angeology banned by the Catholic Church for centuries—and so she settles on the next best thing: _The Mirror of Simple Souls_ by Marguerite Porete, a thirteenth-century mystic.

She reads:

_I am God, says Love, for Love is God and God is Love, and this Soul is God by the condition of Love. I am God by divine nature and this Soul is God by righteousness of Love. Thus this precious beloved of mine is taught and guided by me, without herself, for she is transformed into me, and such a perfect one, says Love, takes my nourishment._

Porete believed that God and Love are the same and saw the Soul as a burning mirror that reflects the divine. Once unified with God, the Soul becomes blameless and spotless, incapable of sin. The Church found this idea immoral and asked Porete to recant, and when she refused they burnt her at the stake as a heretic. Onlookers reported that the mystic went calmly into the flames, resigned to her earthly fate, convinced to the last that perfect holiness doesn’t need Heaven to manifest its true shape; it can do so right here on Earth.

 _Love_ , Porete writes, _can do everything without any misdeed_.

Mallory is curious: is that the condition of angels? When an angel commits a horrible act—like Uriel killing every firstborn son of Egypt in retaliation for the pharaoh’s cruelty to Moses’ tribe—does it cease to be evil and become good? 

And what about Mallory herself, a girl who comes from half-human, half-divine stock? Does she have half a license to sin, so to speak? It sure would be nice to have some moral leeway when it comes to the smaller sins, the peccadilloes that hurt no one, except maybe herself.

Like sleeping with Michael.

Is she going to Hell for coming undone under the boy’s hands and mouth?

Has she doomed herself to an eternity in Hell simply for letting the Antichrist inside her body, bucking up to meet his thrusts when he takes her hard, impaling her on his cock like it’s a punishment as much as a pleasure? 

And what if it’s not just her body that craves the infernal heat of his touch—what if it’s also her heart that calls out to his own, however rotten and stunted?

Mallory doesn’t notice when her hand drifts beyond the elastic band of her panties. She’s not exactly in control when her other hand dips into her pocket and pulls out a little vibrating toy shaped like an egg. Her mother will hardly miss it; there are hundreds of identical toys in her store room. This one is pink and comes with a remote control.

Something is wrong with her. The book is chaste, yet she finds it sexual. Everything sounds profane to her lately, tainted by a love she fears has consumed her entire being, alienated her from the Most High, and allied her to the underworld.

She touches herself with her hand at first, dipping into the wet heat that leaves a damp spot on the cotton. Coating two fingers in her slick, she brings them over her clit and starts rubbing circles there, slow and loose at first, then faster and tighter.

In no time the pressure is starting to build. A small moan escapes her lips as she replaces her fingers with the vibrating toy, touching it lightly to her bud, going over her panties. The sensation explodes in her body, powerful even through the barrier of cloth, even on the toy’s lowest setting.

Painfully sensitive, she is forced to take breaks to keep the orgasm at bay, to delay her gratification. She returns to the book.

The mystic believed that the Soul is annihilated at the moment of its union with God, liquefied by the intensity of its devotion, remade into something higher than itself. What if earthly love has the same effect, only with no reward of Heaven to look forward to?

How strong would your devotion have to be if it led you to the opposite, Mallory wonders, the prospect of eternal damnation?

To console herself, she turns the egg to a highest setting. It almost undoes her. The vibrations are marrow-deep as her whole body turns into a bundle of nerve endings, good for nothing but pleasure. 

What’s gotten into her lately? She reads about God being Love and thinks not of salvation and goodness but of Michael and eternal hellfire.

Her moans get louder as her orgasm nears, but she can’t let herself cum, not yet.  Something is missing, something—

_Thud._

Mallory startles as the sound of an intruder. There’s only a single light on in the whole store—the lamp she’s reading by—and someone’s moving through the shadows. Her eyes are straining in the dark when she hears his voice not two feet away.

“I see how it is.”

Transmuting so he stands directly in front of her, Michael looks menacing by the light of the single lamp. He’s pointing to the toy in her pants.

Mallory just gapes at him, caught, guilty. Her lips are still parted obscenely, her hand between her pajama bottoms and her panties.

“Michael, _fuck_. What are you doing here? You can’t be here.”

Even as her face is turning crimson from embarrassment, her body is humming in sweet anticipation, and her heart is singing acapella, bringing down the opera house with its aria.

“You fly to the other side of the country, only to replace me with _this_. What is it?”

He looks disgusted by the pink gadget she holds up for his inspection. The only saving grace is the trace of wet arousal that seeped onto the toy through her panties. He brings it his nostrils and inhales, then smiles like it’s the sweetest aroma he ever smelled.

_Why are you like this?_

“It’s a Ladygasm vibrator, Michael. Couples can use it too. Haven’t you ever seen a sex toy before?”

“No, and I didn’t need to.”

He’s so furious at the vibrating egg that he crushes it in his hand and pockets the wreckage.

Mallory rolls her eyes. He’s gone from competing with a whole coven of witches for her attention to competing with a plastic toy. It takes her longer than expected to change his mind about destroying every other Ladygasm in her mom’s inventory—as if each were destined to replace his jealous mouth—but it works out in her favor in the end, because eventually that same mouth descends on her with a vengeance, eager to prove its superior worth.  

“Open,” he commands with a hard glint in his eye. Intimacy is clearly the last thing on his mind. This is about reclaiming what is rightfully his, and if she doesn’t comply the consequences will be dire.

Does she want a little demonstration? He peels off her pajama bottoms in one piece, like a gentleman, but then loses all composure when it comes to her panties, which he rips down the front. It’s like the poor, deprived man couldn’t spare the half second it took to slide them down her legs and cast them aside.

The sight of her glistening folds is so tempting to Michael that he plunges in at once between her thighs, coaxing her open with his tongue and then flattening it against her swollen nub. He swirls his tongue around a few times as he seeks a steady rhythm that brings her blood to a boil, and captures her clit between his teeth, grazing the sensitive flesh so she yelps in surprise. Finally, as her moans are getting too loud for comfort, he wraps his lips around her clit and begins to suck, but stops just as she’s about to careen over the edge—

“I didn’t say you could cum.” His voice drips with ice; it reminds her of the vast frozen tundra behind his eyes. “You don’t deserve to cum, not after the shit you pulled.” His lips brush teasingly along the soft flesh of her inner thigh, whispering into the delicate skin. “First you replace me with a machine, depriving me of your sweet release… and now that I finally get to taste you again, you won’t let me savor it…”

Her complaint comes in the form of an incoherent grunt as she lifts herself off the sofa, pushing the book behind the cushion so Michael doesn’t see the title. It hurts to be denied like this. She glares at him from under long fluttering lashes as she watches him rise to a kingly height.

“Get up.”

She obeys. If she doesn’t, the heavy look in his eyes tells her she’ll live to regret it.

“Take off the rest of your clothes. Now.”

She begins to fumble with her pajama top, undoing the buttons one by one, clumsy from the fuck fog that envelops her mind, but Michael has had enough of her bullshit.

“What part of ‘now’ don’t you understand, Mallory?”

With a single telekinetic movement, he pulls her up by her throat and flips her around so her ass is pressed against his hardness, and then rips off her pajama top so the buttons go flying everywhere.

Completely bare now, Mallory shivers as his hot hands rove over the newly annexed territory of her body, pinching and squeezing the pliant flesh, yet avoiding the place where she needs them most.

Oh, how she yearns for release! It’s the only thing on her mind and there’s still a while to wait. Michael transmutes them both in front of the largest mirror in the store and uses telekinesis to move a nearby table between her and the mirror, stopping to admire their shared reflection.

“I want you to see how pathetic you look, how desperately needy for my touch.”

It's a game and it isn't. She nearly screams when his lips brush her ear and a single hand wraps around her throat, choking the words out of her vocal chords.

“You left,” he whispers, tightening the chokehold. “You left after you showed me exactly what you are.” His grip is so strong that she struggles to breathe. “After you tried to distract me from my rightful path.”

Apart from the wild look in his eyes, he’s fully clothed and fully composed—unlike her, who can barely recognize the naked, dripping, keening girl that looks back from the mirror.

She doesn't have a view of it now, but she knows that his cock is beautifully shaped—long, thick, and decorated with veins she is dying to trace with her tongue. He hasn’t let her do that, not yet, and she doesn’t know why. She imagines doing it when it’s glistening with her juices and red, angry-looking even, from the friction of fucking her.

That’s her train of thought as he bends her over the table and forces her head down so the side of her face is pressed on the wood. He waits until he’s satisfied that she won’t move from that position before aligning himself with her entrance, and then waits, biding his time.

“You thought you could tame the beast and stop the Apocalypse, but it’s written in the stars, Mal. Whether you like it or not, you _will_ stand beside me when I destroy the world.”

She squeals “no” and it sounds halfhearted, even to her.

Michael takes the destroyed toy out of his pocket and hovers it in the air, using his magic to repair the damage. When he sets it down on the table beside her, it looks good as new.

“What are you planning to do with that?”

No answer.

“I didn’t say you could move,” he warns.

As if the delicious shame of staying in that compromising position weren’t enough, Michael starts teasing her entrance with the tip of his hardness. She’s going to need more than just the tip. Three times she feels the head of his cock parting her folds from behind, luxuriating in the wetness it finds there, and three times it draws off and leaves her empty. 

“You don’t deserve my cock.”

He’s right. She doesn’t deserve it, not after the shit she pulled.

Not after being dumb enough to get on a plane to Michigan to visit her mother.

Not after putting a vibrating toy where he wants to put his tongue every minute of every day.

Not after contemplating a return to the coven, which is surely planning to kill him even as she’s thinking it now.

“Please… Michael,” she pleads, her dignity a pale memory. When she tries to raise herself off the table, he pins her in place like a collector’s butterfly. “I _need_ it… I’ll be good…”

“And why would you want to do that?” She can  _hear_ the cruel smirk that accompanies these words. “I decide what you need. I decide when you cum, and how intensely, and how many times.” 

Finally, after teasing her heat what feels like hours, he slides his entire length into her at once, with no warning, no preparation. Not that she needs any—it’s a tight fit but her core is so slick with arousal that it takes every inch of him without complaint, begging for more.

When he’s all the way inside he halts, as if the sheer beauty of seeing her speared on his member has knocked the wind out of his sails; the tiniest wiggle from Mallory snaps him out of his daze and he begins to move.

His first thrust makes her wince, more from the anticipation of pain than any actual discomfort, and in no time at all she’s in seventh heaven (or seventh hell) as he starts pounding into her in earnest, unleashing a violence she didn’t expect.

She truly _is_ lost. Just knowing that Michael could snap her like a twig if he chose, that he could annihilate her soul without lifting a finger, takes Mallory to new heights of ecstasy.

Soaring into the stratosphere of sensation like a hot air balloon that has lost its tether, she wonders: how is it possible to have an out-of-body experience when she’s never been more _in_ her body?

Only flesh matters in that moment, not spirit. Nothing pesky like a conscience exists to stop her from surrendering every bit of her heart to this maniac who dreams of incinerating the world and bathing in its ashes. If tears stream down her face, it’s not from shame or doubt. Far from it. Unravelling on Michael’s cock is _exactly_ where Mallory wants to be now, and if she must lie in a bed of ashes to experience it again, so be it. She is tempted to say, _fuck the world_ and _let it burn_. 

She knows it’s wrong to lose herself like this. It’s selfish, and thoughtless, and short-sighted. It makes her a traitor, a sinner, a whore. And it certainly doesn’t help that she’s being watched (and judged) by all the ghosts of feminism’s past, all those saints on the walls of her mom’s bookstore, the Gloria Steinems, the Angela Davises, the Andrea Dworkins.

She’s close and he knows it. Will he be merciful this time and let her to cum? Just when she thinks he can’t penetrate her any deeper, he proves her wrong by varying the angle of his thrusts and hitting that spongy part of her inner walls that makes the pleasure literally unbearable—but rather than let the pressure build to its logical crescendo, he withdraws his cock from her cunt, leaving it gaping in protest.

“W-what are you doing?” She whines, barely coherent. For that bit of insolence his fingers wind into her brown long locks and pull them back harshly, lifting her head so she can see herself in the mirror.

At the worst possible moment, she recalls the words of the French mystic she’d been reading earlier:

_Now this Soul, says Love, is so burned in Love’s fiery furnace that she has become very fire, so that she feels no fire, for in herself she is fire, through the power of Love which has changed her into the fire of Love._

The toy he destroyed and repaired is no longer on the table; it’s slipping between her legs to seek her much abused clit, and he’s controlling it without the remote (because why would he need the remote?) and switching it to vibrate the instant he re-enters her, harshly, inconsiderately, his fingers still tangled in her hair.

“Cum and see," he orders, quoting Jesus but twisting the meaning of those holy words, and she does—she _cums_ like a woman possessed and _sees_ the extent of her fall from grace.

The first orgasm washes over her in an alternation of cooling waves and heating pulses. Her eyes glaze over and her lips draw into a wanton “O” and she’s gasping for breath, no, _panting_ like a bitch in heat.

The deep flush that blossoms on the skin of her face and chest is competing with the red marks that Michael has left on her hips, ass and throat, either to mark his territory or because he forgot his own strength.

Mallory swallows. It’s almost a mistake to meet his eyes in the mirror. There’s real savagery dancing in those baby blues now, and it should scare her to death, not fuel her orgasm to greater heights.

Just as she’s riding the final crest of pleasure she feels him cumming inside, spending his fury in thick ropey spurts that coat her inner walls and ignite a new fire in the pit of her being—

She blacks out.

She misses a lot.

She doesn’t see him carrying her carefully to the sofa, laying her body down with the gentlest of care, and pressing a cool towel to her forehead as he waits for her to regain consciousness. 

He doesn’t tell her about the storm of conflicting emotions raging inside him, the dead certainty about his purpose on Earth warring with his desire to keep the world as it is, or improve it even—whatever would make Mallory happiest.

And neither one of them has any clue about the black Sedan parked at the end of the street, a Trojan horse full of witch-bitches just waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

 

*****

“Gentlemen, there’s a woman here to see you. Well, ‘woman’ may be too strong a word.”

“Send her in, Ms Venable,” Jeff replies through the intercom. It’s just him in the lab with the sex-bots, as Mutt is down on the loading dock, inquiring about a missing ten kilos of coke that somehow "fell off the truck."

Now that it’s finally happening, the thing they always feared would happen, the timing is better than expected. Who knows? It might even work to their advantage.

The glass doors whoosh open and the “woman” totters in, looking a little worse for wear than the day they flipped her switch. Her black leather jacket is ripped, revealing a deep gash in her stomach that bleeds milky white lubricant. Half the synthetic skin on her face is missing, and her gun-arm has been stripped of its hand-glove, but her head is still screwed on the body and that’s what matters.

As long as the head is on, and the nanowire-based lithium ion battery is chugging away like the Energizer Bunny’s wet dream, they’re good to go, nothing a little rewiring can’t fix.

“What happened to you, Ms Mead? You look like you went on a little fender-bender and then took a nap in the junkyard where they stripped you for parts.”

She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t need to. It’s clear what happened from the way she drags her feet and drops like a leaden weight into the nearest swivel chair.

Rejection.

“My boy doesn’t want me anymore! That horrible witch from the coven helped to resurrect the ‘real’ me, and now he wants the robot-me disconnected.”

“There, there, we’ll fix it.” Jeff tries his best to sound comforting. He pats her non-gun hand, but all that exposed tubing and jizz-like coolant is making it a little gross.

Did they program her with the ability to get depressed? He doesn’t remember (they were high). She shouldn’t have the emotional bandwidth to process this type of existential crisis. Then again, the 240s always were a bit twitchy.

“What am I going to do? What’s my purpose now? I’m useless,” the older woman cries, and his first instinct is to get her a tissue, before he remembers that he didn’t build her with tear ducts.

“Dude, you’re not useless, never say that.”

And it’s true; he can think of plenty of uses for this remarkable creation that no one at Kineros could have built unassisted (Satan definitely took the wheel). In fact, Jeff has just the project for robo-Mead, a real head-scratcher of a programming puzzle that could benefit from a synthetic point of view.

“Ms Mead, how would you like to help us start the Apocalypse a little early?”

The robot blinks, assuming she misheard.

“Me? How? Michael plans to use magic—”

Jeff laughs so heartily that nugget of crystallized coke flies out of his left nostril and lands on her sleeve, or what’s left of it.

“Ms Mead, we’re using nuclear bombs to destroy the world, a thousand of them to be exact, and they are falling next week!”

He imitates an explosion with his mouth, but it’s no fun without Mutt there to join in the sound effects.

“If you’re able to help us, we can stick to that deadline. Let me tell you about a little something called the Dead Hand…”


	10. Via Dolorosa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the long wait between chapters! Work has been super-busy, and I just haven't had enough time to write. I've already written half of the next chapter, though, so the next update will be a lot quicker. I had planned one monster chapter, but too much was happening and so I had to split it up.
> 
> Also, this chapter gets really DARK. It kind of shocked me where it went in some places, but it will get lighter, I promise.

“I know what you are,” he whispers.

Her first impulse is to deny it. Instead, she plays it cool, or tries to.

“Really? Who told you?”

“No one.” He sounds insulted, like she underestimated his intelligence. “I figured it out for myself, by process of elimination. It’s obvious, really. You’re not a witch, so what else could you be?”

Although she can’t see his eyes, they’re easy enough to imagine: the heavy lids lowered to half mast, the luminous irises shadowed with lust, the dilated pupils flashing with suspicion because he still doesn’t trust her, not even now.

And why would he? What’s changed in their respective positions over the past week? She’s not on his side because she'd never betray the coven and, coincidentally, the whole world.

“Why are you still so hot to the touch?” He wonders, momentarily distracted by the feel of her skin as his lips descend into the dip where her shoulder meets her neck. It’s a silly question to ask; if her skin is still damp from their earlier exertions, Michael is the reason she can’t seem to cool down. Escape is a laughable prospect when the strong arms of her lover are wound tightly around her waist, pressing her back into the living furnace of his chest, taking full advantage of the sofa being much too narrow for two people. 

_Her lover_. Is that the right word for him?

Michael laughs when Mallory tells him about her conception. She leaves nothing out, not even the detail about the spilled beverage at an anti-globalization protest in the dying days of the gay nineties.

“At least I’m not the product of a school shooter shooting his load into—”

“Stop.” A large hand covers her mouth. “Vulgarity doesn’t become you.”

“I’m just repeating what the ghosts told Madison. I—”

_Fuck._

That was a secret that the coven probably expected her to keep. Michael may give the impression that he’s omnipotent, but he isn’t omniscient, and she really shouldn't have told him that.

“Madison went to the Murder House? When?”

“Forget I said anything. I can’t talk about it.”

“Of course, you can’t,” he says bitterly. “You’re still on Cordelia’s side.”

“I’m not on anyone’s side. I'll be on _your_ side in a heartbeat, the second you abandon this obsession with the apocalypse.”

After spending a whole week with him, Mallory feels that she understands him a little—okay, more than a little—and that fighting the Satanic jihad he imagines as his birth right will never bring him true happiness.

“And what is ‘true happiness,’ according to you?”

“I don’t know. But we can figure it out together.”

The truth is they’ve reached a stalemate in this strange little game of theirs. No resolution is possible, at least none that will satisfy them both. Michael won’t abandon his conviction that he’s the Chosen One, and neither will Mallory aid and abet a monster, becoming one in her turn. Even if he rejected the prophecy, he’d never join the coven, not after what the witches did to his Ms. Mead, and it’s not like Cordelia would accept him with open arms.

In fact, if Mallory were to show up at Miss Robichaux’s right now, fresh from her jaunt with their mortal enemy to parts unknown, her Supreme would have a lot of questions. And she can’t even blame Cordelia for her mistrust because if Mallory were Supreme, she wouldn’t trust herself either. 

_Oh, god._

Her mind reels with regrets as the afterglow starts to fade.

What has she done in allying herself with the Antichrist? The unthinkable.

And why did she do it? She doesn’t know, exactly.

The best way to distract herself from these heavy thoughts is to chase pleasure again, Mallory decides. While it won’t end the stalemate between her and Michael, it _will_ keep her body occupied with sensations while her subconscious works to figure out her next move.

Shifting her hips ever so slightly until her ass brushes his crotch, seemingly by accident, she readies her next verbal volley.

“When’s the last time you actually spoke to your father? Getting punked by Nan doesn’t count. I know it’s a depressing thought, but don’t you think it’s possible that he’s abandoned you? That you’re simply not the son he hoped for? There’s no shame in being your own person, you know.”

Michael groans. If anyone else spoke to him this way, he’d rip their heart out and take a bite like it’s a juicy apple. But with Mallory he does nothing more violent than reach for her throat and apply the tiniest pressure to her windpipe, more as a warning than a threat—and even that he negates by burying his nose into the crook of her neck and inhaling deeply, as if her animal scent is a balm against her insolence.

Her “accidental” brush against his crotch has worked its magic. He’ll fully hard and ready for more action in no time, and he’s none too pleased about it.

“I swear by all that is foul and unholy, you’re not really an angel’s bastard but a succubus sent by my Father to punish me for being pathetic by making me even more pathetic. Take a good look at what you’ve reduced me to, Mallory. I’m a slave to carnal appetites now.”

"And what about me, Michael? You think I've been thinking with my brain lately?"

The electric strum of desire is resonating in her core again when she remembers the “punishments” that she recently “endured” at his hands, how he subjected her body to such dominating “mistreatment” that she may be unable to walk back upstairs in the morning and look her mother in the eye. But when she leans back against him, his hardness is gone; he's shifted away, trying to take flesh out of the question.

“The prophecy is very real,” he tells her, pretending to have regained a modicum of self-control. “You may not believe in it, Mal, but I can’t shake the feeling that you’re part of it somehow. I’ll tell you what. Let’s contact my Father, together. There’s a new ritual I found that I want us to try.”

“Excuse me? I’m not cutting open my veins and sinking down into that hell pit of despair if I can help it. One Descensum was more than enough.”

“It’s not like Descensum. Your soul remains here, grounded in the earthly realm. Let me show you the ancient spell book that I got from Hawthorne—”

_Wait._

She wonders if she heard him correctly.

“When did you go to Hawthorne?”

A long silence.

“Before I came here,” he admits, sheepishly.

“You took a detour before coming to Michigan?” And here she assumed he was dying to see her, ready to move Heaven and Earth to quell the pain of a measly 24-hour separation. “Is that why you came here, for another fucking ritual? And the warlocks just gave you what you wanted, no questions asked?”

“I was their champion once, their best hope for a male Supremacy. Is it that hard to believe they would give me a stupid spell book?”

“Frankly, yes, now that they know who you are.”

Unbidden, an image flashes into her mind: a massacre at Hawthorne, dismembered limbs strewn about the piano room and the walls splattered with blood, all because the warlocks refused to give him what he wanted at the exact moment he wanted it.

“Did you hurt them? Tell the truth.”

Another long silence.

“No.”

She can practically feel his effort to dissemble through the physical desire that fogs his mind. He's grabbing for any old rhetorical strategy now, even the most pathetic one: reverse psychology.

“Maybe I should’ve expected you to refuse. Clearly you can’t handle another ritual, given your weaker parentage.”

“Me? Weaker than you?” She laughs, even as, ironically enough, it takes all of her physical strength to break free of his hold. “Explain to me, Michael, how an archangel they call the Flame of God is weaker than a fallen seraph starved of Heaven’s light for several millennia.”

After her recent display of raw power took his breath away in limbo, he still imagines her as being weaker? Not only that, but she literally _died_ for him in a dangerous ritual to rescue an undeserving woman from an eternity of boredom.

“It’s simple. Seraphim trump archangels,” he retorts like they’re playing some arcane version of rock, paper, scissors.

“Since when?”

“Since always.”

If he meant to distract her from her questions about what happened at Hawthorne, it worked like a charm. Rather than imagining the possibly imaginary, possibly real massacre at the boys’ school, Mallory is wondering how much power Satan lost in his fall from Heaven. Powerful he may still be, but the angelic satellite must have burnt up half his fuel when he blasted free of God’s orbit. At least.

“My Father worshipped at the throne of the Almighty while yours was flying hither and thither, doing his dirty work. Still does,” her lover adds, like it’s something to be ashamed of. “And how many innocents have the archangels executed because he commanded it? More than on Father, who only who inherits the guilty ones.”

Mallory has to admit that he's got a point there, annoyingly. If the Old Testament apocrypha are to be believed, her mother, or father, or however Uriel identified back in the time of Moses, was the angel tasked with checking the doors of Egypt for smeared lamb’s blood.

No lamb’s blood? No protection from the plague that took every male firstborn in the nation.

However you slice it, that doesn’t seem like the work of a loving creator to Mallory. She'll never tell Michael about her doubts, of course, because he’ll only fan the flames of her benign little heresy until it's a full-blown conflagration, a holy war with the entire globe as collateral.

Well, one thing is for certain.

“You’re not more powerful than me,” she reminds him. “If anything, our parents are evenly matched.”

“Prove it. Stand by my side at the end of the world. Help me build a better one without all the hypocrisy.”

“As your equal?”

“As my queen.”

She thinks. She can’t think. She’s not seriously considering it. Unless she is.

It strikes her as odd that she's more bothered by the tone of the invitation than its content. It irks her that it sounds so casual. Michael says "let’s end the world" in the same tone as he would say "let’s go down to the 24-hour corner store for some ice cream."

Getting ice cream isn’t a bad idea, actually.

But first, she's got to distract him.

“Michael?”

“What?”

Mallory surprises him by flipping around in his arms so they’re laying chest to chest. Their noses brush and breaths combine as she closes the distance between them, largely to defend against the blue violence of his eyes.

A weaponized gaze has her in its cross hairs. Time to go on the offensive.

“It’s time,” she whispers, her best attempt at vocal seduction.

“Time for what?”

It takes him an embarrassingly long time to catch her drift. He gets it as he follows her gaze lower and lower, now that she’s spelling it out in the non-verbal equivalent of sky writing, a tiny aircraft blowing big smoke. 

“You want to do _that_? Are you sure? I wasn’t exactly gentle with you earlier.”

A sly hand cups her heat, as if to ensure that she’s still in one piece.

“I didn’t want you to be gentle."

Besides, it’s not like that thoroughly abused hole will be the star of this particular attraction. She’s laser-focused now on the neglected cock that’s trapped between their bodies, a dutiful organ that’s been standing at attention for a while, thick and long and veined and turning all shades of red and purple.

Michael is painfully hard when he grinds against her naked thigh. His breath hitches when she takes him in hand, and a few droplets of precum collect on her index finger like morning dew. He follows her finger with his eyes as it travels up to her lips and disappears under her tongue, and remains mesmerized as she guides him to lie on his back, leaving a trail of butterfly kisses from his neck to his chest and from his chest to his stomach.

Mallory resists the urge to giggle when the lightest covering of blonde hairs on his pelvis tickles her cheeks and chin. Taking hold of his cock by the root, she moves to the sensitive underside and licks a determined stripe up to the tip and then back down again, before lavishing some much-needed attention on his balls. Shame on her for neglecting them; she loves how heavy they feel in the palm of her hand and how responsive their owner is to her lightest touch here. When her eyes travel back up to meet his darkening gaze, his eyelashes flutter closed and mouth falls open to form a worshipful “O.”

Without realizing he’s doing it, Michael is bucking his hips to match the movement of her head until her nose brushes against downy curls around his cock. Her fleeting worry that she’ll choke on his considerable girth is dispelled when he collides with the back of her throat without incident. She swallows him again and again until they establish a rhythm that has him moaning her name like it’s the Dark Lord’s prayer.

Every so often, she releases him with a wet pop to collect more of that delicious essence on her tongue, admiring how the now-purple head glistens with a mixture of saliva and precum. When her hand takes over from her mouth, she experiments with all manner of touches, trying hard strokes, soft strokes, and strokes that swivel around his engorged length like a corkscrew. He loves it all.

And when Mallory tries the corkscrew trick with her mouth, his mouth releases a litany of curse words so vile that his Father's ears must be prickling all the way down in Hell.

Satan who? Once Michael is taken over by sensation, body and fucking soul, his dream of ending the world seems like a distant memory. No longer content to keep bucking his hips to meet the fluid motions of her head, he entangles his fingers in her hair and tugs her downwards, plunging deeper down her throat than she thought possible.

“Slow down… unless you want me to come….”

Breathless now, he’s not sure how much more of this he can take. But she doesn’t slow down. The infuriating girl only picks up the pace, like she’s performing the world’s least conventional exorcism.

It’s no use resisting it much longer. Michael lets go with a pathetic cry, painting Mallory's throat in thick spurts of cum that are searing hot and spaced a few moments apart. 

Wiping her lips with the back of her hand, she raises her head to survey the damage done to his dignity. He stares back in wonder, like he’s seeing her for the first time.

“That was a… religious awakening.”

She smiles but can’t maintain it for long. Rubbing her jaw, she’s still feeling the impossible stretch.

“Are you a convert now?”

The wild-haired blonde flops back on the sofa in defeat. Heavy lids close on irises the color of a secluded lagoon.

“To what? The cult of Mallory? Yes, I worship at the altar of your every desire. Can't you see I'm on my hands and knees? Command me, oh goddess, and I will obey without question.”

While he's only half-serious, she's tempted her to test his so-called devotion.

“My first command to you is this: go down to the convenience store at the end of the street and get me a large tub of pistachio ice cream.” She repeats the command when he looks back at her dumbly. “ _Now_ , Michael, before you fall into disfavor with your goddess.”

Without a word of complaint, he gets up and starts putting on his pants. He’s fully dressed and at the door by the time Mallory remembers a peculiarity of the establishment in question.

“You have cash on you, right? They don’t take credit cards, for whatever reason.”

“Umm… no? I was planning to use the black card the Church gives to all its elite members.” He takes out his wallet and shows her the silver Baphomet engraved on the black piece of plastic. “Mine is limitless. I could buy a Ferrari today if I wanted to.”

Why a Ferrari? With a fond shake of her head, Mallory stuffs a few green bills into the pocket of his elegant pea coat, wondering if she’s ever seen that particular garment before. It must be new, charged on his black card like the luxury car he might be driving through her street by this time tomorrow. 

The second he’s gone, she decides to put on some clothes. She wonders how she'll get her “friend” out the bookstore before her mother comes down and starts asking the difficult questions.

If Michael isn't back in LA soon—or maybe in Denver, at the underground complex where Mallory spent an eventful few days in captivity—the Satanists may start looking far and wide for their lord and savior, and the last thing she needs is to have them coming to Michigan. Vanessa alone may be organizing a national search by now, if that crazy bitch isn't too busy planning her wedding to even notice that Michael is missing.

Something catches her eye from the corner of the room—a burst of pink light.

That’s odd.

The neon signage that spells out “Venus Envy” under the awning is blazing away like someone forgot to turn it off a few hours ago, but Mallory is certain that she remembered.

She slips out into the crisp night air to get the light manually, but when she flips it, nothing happens. The fluorescent light remains stubbornly on, like it’s glowing brighter than before.

Mallory blinks. Then she understands.

_Of course._

Right before she collapses, struck from the back by an unseen force, the neon “V” expands to fill her entire field of vision.

It's the last thing she sees in this timeline. Not a “V” for victory, but a “V” for violation.

 

*****

The witches lower their dark hoods and rip off their silver masks and gloves once they’re safely inside the black-windowed SUV with the enchanted plates, speeding past the convenience store at the end of the street. The tinfoil stays on as it's under their clothes, protecting them from Michael's ability to sense magic users from a distance. With Cordelia’s bodyguard at the wheel and Myrtle riding shot gun, the three younger witches help the Supreme bind Mallory's hands and feet, lest the half-angelic being awake from the magic-induced sleep before it's time to start the incantation.

Madison breaks the long silence as the car rounds the corner to reveal the small pond where they’ll be casting the spell.

“Raise your hand if you feel weird that we're using literal Antichrist jizz to manipulate the fabric of spacetime?” The bitchy witch raises her hand. “Just me? Okay, then. You better hope Miss Angel Wings over here swallowed the whole load.”

In the absence of the requisite lock of hair, the coven plans to navigate Michael's timeline by unconventional means: the contents of Mallory’s stomach.  

Cordelia wipes a loose hair off the poor girl's face as they lay her down. It almost pains her to see her former charge rendered unconscious and manhandled like that, but it’s necessary for the spell they’re about to perform. Tempus Infinituum is risky magic at the best of times. The fact that it’s being performed by five strong witches and powered by the elemental force of a living Nephilim means that the spell will likely succeed, but there's a big margin for error. They’re wading into uncharted waters here, armed with a compass whose needle is liable to spin in any direction.  

If Cordelia is right, then the group will end up in late 2011, shortly after Michael's conception in the Murder House and just in time to prevent his birth the following year. It took the Supreme a while to determine that it would be impossible to navigate the boy's timeline and arrive at a point before the hellmouth funneled all of its dark energy into the devil's half-human avatar. What they can do, however, is eliminate the monster while still _in utero._

Catastrophe averted, the witches plan to raze the Murder House and ward the plot of land so heavily that no innocent will step on that accursed site ever again. A journey seven years into the past is both dangerous and unprecedented, and yet the untold sacrifice that the women are making won't be in vain, Cordelia assures them.

Once they accomplish their mission, the witches will have two choices. Either they kill and replace their younger doppelgangers so they can re-live those seven years with the foreknowledge to avoid the same mistakes, some of them deadly, or they abandon their former lives and start fresh with new names and identities. 

“This is some Doctor Who shit,” Queenie says in an attempt to lighten the leaden mood. She knows what choice she'll make, and Zoe will do the same; maybe they'll move to New Zealand together and open a new witch school with all the Lotto winnings they'll be racking up.

Well, that won't be all the young witches do. Queenie and Zoe plan to return home to rewrite a little American history once a certain presidential election is on the horizon. _No emails, no Trump_ , is their motto. As for the rest of it, Queenie believes they can do better than Hillary. What was Kamala Harris doing at that point in the timeline?

Only Madison will have no trouble whacking her double over the head so she can steal her life once she performs a little de-aging magic to look twenty again (not that she needs it).

"I feel like a fucking burrito in this getup," the ex-actress whines, pulling at the foil that she claims is chaffing her crotch. She's still mad about having to leave Christian behind in the future. Assuming that all goes well and they arrive in 2011, her already younger paramour will be literal jailbait. A bitch who's been to Hell and back has no time to waste on underage warlocks.

"You hoes will change your minds about killing yourselves the second you land in the past," Madison predicts. Too bad her friends haven't been smart by spending the last few days getting on intimate terms with a certain Dow Jones, namely by studying all his recent moves.

As for Myrtle, she doesn't believe that the witches will end up in 2011 like the Supreme intends.

“We’re travelling down Michael’s time stream, Delia, so it’s entirely possible that the current will wash us ashore before we reach the beginning of his life."

Barely able to disguise her irritation, Cordelia pretends to listen to the older woman's concerns, but she doesn't hear them, not really. They've had this conversation too many times already.

The Supreme wondered why her flame-haired mentor was so certain that they would end up in 2015. Why not 2012? Or 2016? Or 1916, for that matter? There were so many possibilities.

"2015 is the year that the monster was at his most vulnerable," Myrtle explained, and she's holding firm on her point now. "His grandmother kicked him out when he killed the priest sent to perform his exorcism, right after he had that unnatural growth spurt. You keep forgetting, Delia, that while the spell is guided by a strong woman's will, it is amplified by emotion, and there are various emotional energies at play here, too many to keep separate. Michael's. Ours. Hers."

She points to Mallory, who's still lost to the world on the floor of the vehicle. A look of pity briefly crosses the older woman's bespectacled face, though not enough to divert her from the righteous mission at hand.

Cordelia waves her doubts away.

"The girl is unconscious. She won't be interfering with the spell. Her only role is to power it."

"Maybe. But her magic is so different from ours. We know only a little of what she's capable of. Don't forget about the dreams that change reality. If that's not supremely creepy, then what is?"

 _Supremely._ The word is deliberately chosen to wound, to make Cordelia doubt her supremacy in witchcraft. And she hasn't forgotten about Mallory's dreams. She's doing the best she can with what she's got.

In Cordelia's humble opinion, it's better to stop a monstrous baby from instinctively tearing its way through he human birth canal than it is to kill a moral agent who is at least trying to be good. Cleaner, too, because no one really knows if the Antichrist is killable at any point in his timeline. But whether or not Myrtle agrees with this twisted moral calculus, she can't shake the feeling that her beloved protege is dealing with another, even trickier ethical quandary.

If the Supreme wants to reassume her role later on in the new timeline, she'll have to replace her doppelganger without any delay, and surely that will leave a disfiguring scar on her darling Delia's already blemished soul.

The Cordelia Foxx of 2011 was timid as a mouse, living in Fiona Goode's shadow, unwittingly married to the scion of the Delphi Trust. Unaware of the ruthless streak she inherited from her mother and would one day accept as her birthright, the younger Delia will die by ingesting a poison brewed from the herbs that grow in her own greenhouse, and when the future Supreme takes the place of her past double—all for the good of the coven, of course, nothing but the coven—neither Hank nor Fiona will stand the ghost of a chance.

If they end up in 2015, however, the task of killing Michael will be that much more difficult, even if Myrtle will have one advantage: her double will be dead and buried already, burnt at the stake in her favorite Balenciaga. No murder necessary. Not that she would consider it. 

They park the car near manicured path that leads down to the pond. It's the dead of night and not a soul is present to witness five black-robed women exiting the black SUV in a single file while the albino bodyguard carries the sixth one hoisted over his shoulder.

When they reach the dark water that glittering under the streetlamps, Madison turns up her nose. The tinfoil armor she was mocking earlier doesn't seem like such a bad look anymore, now that she's looking at the possibility of wading amid flesh-eating bacteria.

"Relax, Mads, the water is clean. We'll all take a shower once we get there," Zoe reminds her.

"Where? At the Murder House, with all the ghosts watching? No thanks."

Cordelia is ready to start the spell. There's no time to wait—everyone must strip off the tinfoil, now, before putting on their robes again. Once this is achieved, the bodyguard lowers the unconscious body of Mallory into the pond, where she floats on her back like a drowned Ophelia among the weeds, blissfully unaware that she's about to be used as a kind of angelic firestarter. The witches form their magic circle around her by entwining their fingers and starting the Latin incantation, water reaching up to their waists.

_Balneum infinitum. Dona salui conductus…_

The power of each witch is unique, like a fingerprint or a strand of DNA. United, they are stronger than any terrestrial force, and all that is in evidence here.

In no time at all the pond is roiling and bubbling and turning black and whipping up in little waves all around their magic circle. The waves threaten to sweep them up in their current, but their feet remain on the sludgy bottom, enchanted to stand firm for the time being.

Mallory is the first to be dragged under as the water level rises in the little neighborhood pond and begins to pull all five witches into the swirling vortex, powered by a magic more ancient than the entire continent.

Something snaps and breaks—a dam, a riverbank—and the water is suddenly everywhere, like a new deluge of biblical proportions. The women know they must stay focused on the Latin incantation even as their lungs fill with black fluid, and so they let go, daring to drown. Such willingness to die could well be the cost of performing this magic, a witch's way of letting the ancient powers know that she's deserving of the honor to be its earthly vehicle.

The spell is no longer something to be spoken aloud. Rather, it's a command to be infused into the very air they no longer breathe and dissolved in the water they swim through, mobile in the moving element until the ground reforms under their feet and they return to consciousness.

 

*****

Mallory awakes to bird song and police sirens and a pounding headache and the sun at its zenith, glaring white hot. The sky is blue, so cruelly blue, not a cloud in sight.

Where is she? Why doesn't she remember coming here and falling asleep on the park bench?

It makes no sense. She should be inside her mother's house in Michigan. Michael should be with her—where is Michael? There's no sign of him anywhere. For a boy capable of limitless evil, at least in theory, he'd leave her outside like this, vulnerable and unprotected as she's sleeping off whatever calamity visited her last night and took away her short-term memory.

The scene is strange. Unnatural. There are palm trees on the periphery of her vision. There aren't any palm trees in Michigan.

A jogger nearly crosses her path but runs a wide circle to avoid her. Going by her disheveled clothes and wild hair, he must be thinking that she's troubled or homeless.

"Wait! Sir! Don't leave!"

But the jogger has jogged away already and she's alone on the path again, wondering where the fuck she is as she watches two women with strollers watching her cautiously from a distance. As they swerve to avoid her as well, Mallory wonders if resorting to a spot of Concilium would niggle at her ethically, then decides that it wouldn't, not one bit.

Luckily, a confrontation with the two mothers is avoided when she notices a newspaper peeking out of a nearby trashcan and fishes it out with two fingers wrapped in tissue.

_What the fuck?_

It's the _Los Angeles Times_. The date is October 16, 2015.

The instant that she's able to piece together what happened, she's using Concilium right, left and center to reach Michael as quickly as inhumanly possible. Spontaneous, non-verbal magic allows her to pull the right address out of thin air, along with detailed directions on how to get there from her current location.

Her unwilling chauffeur is a suburban father taking his daughter to soccer practice, an eight-year-old brat in pigtails who's prepared to scream all the way to the Murder House before Mallory casts _perpetuum clausis_ and orders her zombie-like father to run all the red lights.

In less than seven minutes, they arrive at the house and she practically crashes through the iron gate, sending her magic through the air in invisible arcs. When there's no answering pull of darker energy, she realizes that something is wrong.

Out of the corner of her eye, Mallory spots a blonde woman in her mid-sixties with a bouffant hairdo and a lit cigarette dangling from her drawn lips. She's watching her warily like the jogger and mothers in the park, and yet her expression of distrust is better informed.

After a few seconds of Mallory staring back at her with an equal intensity and mistrust, Constance Langdon finally speaks, a scowl distorting her handsome features. 

"You won't find him there, witch. Or anywhere."

She doesn't need to be told why. She can sense it already, the void filling with light and hope where Michael's aura of infernal despair would normally choke them out.

It feels to Mallory like the asphalt road beneath her feet is turning to quicksand. If she didn't know any better, she'd swear she was performing Descensum and sinking into that pit of hopelessness that draws its power from every sinner's worst fear.

In actuality, Hell would be a wonderful place to be right about now, if only Michael would greet her there with open arms. Because she _would_ enter Hell without a moment's hesitation and agree to spend an eternity roasting on a spit over her personal open flame, if only she could undo the colossal wrong that has been done to him on this day.

She transmutes until she's standing behind Constance, startling her into dropping her cigarette, then maneuvers the ridiculous woman so she's hovering a foot off the ground, caught by the throat in a Vader-like chokehold amid her abundant, late-blooming rosebushes.

"I'm no witch," Mallory practically spits in her face as she gathers reserves of power into her balled fists, palms tingling from the desperate need for a murderous release. "If you want to draw another breath in this lifetime, you'll tell me _exactly_ what happened, down to the last detail. _When_ they came. _What_ they did. And what they told you to tell me."

She would rather have her toenails peeled off one by one than hear about what the witches did to Michael, and yet she needs to be informed to figure out how to fix it.

Constance is straining to breathe, expiring dramatically in a bid for sympathy from the furious girl. None is possible.

"They... they incinerated his body until there was nothing left. That is, _after_ they ran him over with a vehicle..." She regains her voice just in time to smile broadly in Mallory's face. "Three times they ran him over... when I came out to see about all the commotion, his body was broken in so many places that he could barely beg me to drag him there—" she glances in the direction of the Murder House before giving the girl one last look of pure triumph. "....so he could be with me forever. I told him to go to Hell. I will tell you the same."

Mallory drops her without another word. Tears aren't even on the horizon of possibility now—her blood is alive with rage, an endless flow of it as pure as a periodic element.

Constance is an afterthought, a speck of dirt too unimportant to kill, not even when she shouts after the retreating girl that she's too much of a coward to do it, just like the witches told her she'd be.

Proving the old woman wrong tempts Mallory not one bit. She's too focused on imagining Michael—her Michael!—hunted, broken, burnt, his ashes not even scattered over the earth, dust not allowed to return to dust.

No. Cordelia used what reeks suspiciously like dark magic to remove both the lingering residue of his body and the energetic traces of his hell-forged soul from this plane of existence. From _any_ plane of existence, most probably.

Since when has the ethereal Supreme known how to cast that kind of spell? And what did she sacrifice to acquire that knowledge? While Mallory refuses to speculate, she dearly hopes it was the entirety of her soul. If she's destined to end up in Hell, she'll see Cordelia there, for sure. 

Her only thought now is of how to undo the pseudo-heroic deed that saved the world. Either she'll perform the Tempus Infinituum like the witches did while siphoning off her boundless reverses of energy, or she'll dust off her childhood gift, or curse, as some have called it. That gift is, of course, the ability to change reality with her dreams.

Mallory has done it before and she plans to do it again. Somehow, she'll wake up in another, better world, one more suited to her particular desires even if it ends up being literally unlivable for everyone else.

Over the course of the next week, she holes up in an expensive hotel, which she pays for it by skimming off a few ATMs and rigging a few slot machines at the nearest casino. She's no longer worried about crossing the ethical line. Pedestrian morality can go fuck itself up the ass, for all the good it's done her.

Time is of the essence here and yet—as she attempts over and over again to cast the Tempus Infinituum spell with a series of objects taken from Constance's house and an enormous hotel bathtub—time is not on her side.

The clock hands won't budge an inch. The calendar on the wall remains woefully unturned. The past refuses to yield to her will and be navigated like a river. The world stubbornly cleaves to the laws of causality. The dead stay dead.  The living—who cares about the living? 

Over the next few months, Mallory develops quite the little drinking problem as she moves from hotel to hotel under a string of assumed names, emptying the mini-bar almost the minute she flops on the newly made bed. Losing herself in both morning and evening, both hope and despair, she does whatever it takes to keep casting the Tempus Infinituum day after day.

It never works. 

Feeling like an abomination, a creature whose life force is utterly misaligned with a universe that wouldn't suffer her to live if others only knew the secret wasteland of her soul, she doesn't even consider going to Michigan to visit her mother. Why would she want to disturb the younger, more innocent Mallory as she lives her life in utter ignorance of her true nature and angelic parentage? She hardly thinks of the coven anymore and would never go to New Orleans in a million years, even if Cordelia and her accomplices have slaughtered all their doppelgangers there (she has no way of knowing if this happened; she doesn't really care).

Instead, she stays put in Los Angeles, crying her eyes out until the well has run dry. She rants until she loses her voice, to no one in particular, and rages against the heavens rather than pray to a God that permitted Michael to be born and die in such infamy.

She doesn't blame the devil, see. It's God's fault if it's anyone's.

She prays to everyone—anyone—else for salvation.

To the old gods who demanded human sacrifice in exchange for great and terrible power.

To the third of the angelic host that fell from Heaven and were reborn in darkness as the demonic legions.

To Uriel, who continues to ignore her daughter and probably rues the day that said daughter was conceived; Uriel, who would probably put Mallory out of her endless misery if she only cared to visit the earthly realm.

To Satan.

Mallory, who has never asked the Most Foul for anything, goes on her own little sojourn to the wilderness, retracing the footsteps that Michael never took to contact his Father at the lowest point in his life.

She uses a stick to draw a pentagram on the ground in the middle of the forest, and stays within its perimeter for four whole days, by the end of which she's dehydrated and starved and hallucinating all manner of horrible things until she takes a dagger from her jacket pocket and opens her veins in an attempt to die, truly die, after making her case for the last time.

“Just give a sign. Let me know that he’s _somewhere_. That he exists, even if he’s suffering…”

Instead of dying in the wilderness, she ends up performing Descensum without even speaking the Latin words.   

She doesn't even realize that she's in Hell at first, and later that her body is still alive in the earthly realm and waiting for her soul’s return.

Compared to what she saw during her Seven Wonders, the staging of her personal hell has changed. Gone is the juvenile scenario of child-Mallory being chased through a cornfield by religious fanatics bearing pitchforks, all for the crime of reviving a dead bird. In its place is a stage; she’s inside an enormous church that's really an underground cavern and filled with thousands of devil worshippers.

She blinks at the red spotlights that shine in her eyes. This place is the Satanist complex under the Denver airport. And she's on the same stage where she met Michael for the first time while he performed his sacrifices for an audience cheering for their lord and savior while his angelic countenance filled the jumbotron.

Only the congregation isn't cheering now. The cave is so silent that you could hear a hair fall. It takes Mallory a moment to realize that all eyes in the church are converging on her. She’s the ethereal fly in their foul ointment, a disturbance in the Force of their perfect universe of horrors, the only person who doesn’t belong.

Or maybe she _does_ belong, just not as a congregant. As a sacrifice.

Someone is crossing the stage behind her as an invisible power arrests her feet so she can't turn around to face her antagonist.

“My Father was right about you, Mallory.”

It’s a dear voice, one she hasn’t heard in a while. She nearly collapses in tears, or would if she were allowed to move.

_Michael._

She’s found him.

Except that she hasn’t, not really.

It's Michael in the flesh, or spirit, but a simulation designed to torment her in her personal hell.

It doesn't matter. When he flips her around telekinetically so they’re face to face, she drinks him in, finding unexpected solace in this faithful copy of his beloved form, beautiful and terrible all at once.

Yet this is Hell; the joy that she feels is short-lived, a cruel mirage; there is no answering look of recognition on Michael’s face as he assesses her from head to toe. His gunmetal stare lingers on her dirty soles and stringy, unwashed hair. His lips curl downwards in disgust.

“My Father was right to request you as tribute, despite your sorry state. Your soul will burn extra-bright in his honor, like a star streaking across the heavens in the hour before dawn, before it’s extinguished forever.”

She doesn’t protest her fate. Why would she want to? Mercy is the last thing on her mind as she kneels before this unholy specter.

Every true believer in the house cheers as Michael leads Mallory to the wooden podium where the cruciform structure is erected. She screams in pain as he nails her open palms to the horizontal crossbar and then moves down to her dirty feet, binding them to the supporting platform where she half-expects him to produce another set of nails. He doesn’t; instead, he blindfolds her and then reaches behind to take something from the simulacrum of Mead—whether she’s human or robot hardly matters in a place where everything is simulated anyway. When he crowns her with the symbolic thorns made from twisted barbed wire, she can feel every bit of metal cutting into her forehead and scalp.

“There,” Michael coos, admiring her devilish adornment. “Now you’re a true queen, ruling your own little slice of Hell.”

The rest of her passion play is both excruciating and uneventful, agonizing and predictable down to its last beat.

The searing pain. The cruel look on Michael's face. The silence of the congregation. Their palpable bloodlust erupting in taunts and jeers. The illusion resets itself when she bleeds out before he incinerates her soul, but not before she is taunted by the Chosen One himself as he regales the crowd of Satanists by telling them stories of her good deeds. 

Good deeds. Remember those? She forgot that she has a few under her belt. Loving and losing the Antichrist has a way of rewiring your memory to only remember the bad stuff.

How many times does she experience her own crucifixion? One hundred times? One thousand?

She doesn't die, which is a disappointment in itself.

For some reason that she can’t begin to fathom, she manages to return to her body in the forest. How she does it is a mystery for the ages on par with the fate of Atlantis, the lost city of El Dorado, and the Roanoke colony. Mallory barely has the strength to extricate herself from a cobweb, let alone leave her personal hell, so there _must_ be some other agent in play, an unseen guardian watching her misery for the sidelines.

If it’s Uriel, she’s given no sign. When is she ever given a sign?

Leaving Hell is where the miracles end. Mallory doesn't wake up in the forest. That would be far too easy on her personal road to Calvary. No, she awakes on the cargo side of a truck rumbling down the interstate in the dead of night, and it takes her a while to understand the implications. The dense fog of apathy only dissipates when she notices the dried blood stains on the floor of the vehicle and the hooks that recently contained animal carcasses (or she hopes they were animals).   

“Get up,” orders a gruff voice when the truck comes to a complete stop and the back door opens to reveal a lonely farmhouse in the middle of an open field.

When she doesn’t get up, the man yanks her out by the hair and drags her towards an abandoned-looking barn with no heating and no lights on. The barn is a chamber of horrors, the workroom of a serial killer. If Descensum dropped her into the fire, Mallory has jumped out of it straight into the frying pan, or an earthly approximation of Hell.

There is a girl there, or several; it’s hard to tell how many in the dark. The pitiful-looking, emaciated creates are chained inside pens that normally house cattle, whimpering, afraid to raise their heads and take in the newest arrival.

Finally, it dawns on her that there is a world outside her own suffering. Before attending to the imprisoned girls, she turns to the man and twirls her hand in the air. The instant his body flies up, it’s like a marionette going through an invisible meat grinder, twisting and turning in several directions at one. Mallory almost feels sorry when she surveys the remains of what must have been his ribcage, organs spilling out like a cannibal’s cornucopia onto the dirt floor. The girls cower in fear of her when she invites them to leave the barn so they can drive to the nearest hospital. It makes her feel like a monster. 

One year has passed, then two, then three. It's a lie when they say that time heals all wounds. Her grief never lessens.

Mallory never stops wondering about where Michael is and whether or not he’s suffering. The idea that he’s suffering is consolation because if he’s suffering that means he’s alive; he hasn’t been wiped from existence.

She doesn’t try to contact Satan again.

She forgets about performing Descensum.

She abandons any attempt to cast the Tempus Infinituum.

Instead, Mallory hatches a new plan to bring Michael back by dreaming like she’s done only once in the past, when she warped reality to make it safer for herself and her mother.

The only problem is that she’s no longer a blundering ten-year-old unaware of the ancient magic coiled in her veins. The pressure of trying to induce a particular dream nearly kills her, but if it’s a skill she can learn then she is determined to learn it, damn the consequences to herself, and the world.

Her days and nights are spent poring over scientific journals and scouring the Internet, wandering to the outer reaches of the dark web in pursuit of information on what could induce “effective” dreaming.

One lucky day, she stumbles across a lead. It’s an advertisement in a newspaper for a study being conducted at a place called The Global Institute for Oneiric Precognition.

The Boston-based “institute” doesn’t seem to be affiliated with any university, let alone one with a good reputation, and the ad makes no mention of dreams that change reality, only those that predict future events. But Mallory has nothing to lose and everything to gain, “everything” being a full restoration of the old timeline, and so she picks up the phone and dials the number.

_Michael, I’m coming._

 


	11. Iron Maiden

It's close to midnight by the time she arrives at the Global Institute for Oneiric Precognition, a low grey building on the outskirts of Newton, Massachusetts, wedged between a laser tag arena and a factory outlet for baby clothes. The whole place feels a little slapdash and improvised, like a fly-by-night affair that might vanish by next morning, all evidence of it shredded and burned—and, if necessary, killed and buried.

A tall woman in a white lab coat has a questionnaire for her to complete in the windowless reception area. Well, she’s not really a woman. For the magically inclined, a robot is easy to spot by the absence of aura.

“Welcome, Miss—?”

“Mallory. Just call me Mallory.”

“Very well, Miss Mallory. Once you fill out the forms, I’ll take you to see Dr. Endrra.”

It’s dangerous here. Mallory can smell the moral rot in the air. She’s walked into a trap, a conspiracy of some kind. Storm clouds are gathering overhead, and the canary in the coalmine is singing its little heart out right before it suffocates, and yet she’s still here, eager and willing to risk it all for the one goal that’s been driving her for the past three years, four months, and counting.

She’ll get Michael back if it kills her. She’ll get him back if it kills _everyone_ she knows. It won’t come to that, of course.  

As she follows the robot through a network of identical hallways, all as grey and ornament-free as the reception, she begins to descend, little by little, as if into the bowels of the earth. The question of why they aren’t taking the elevator (if there even _is_ an elevator in this “institute") occupies her mind as she stares at the back of the robot’s head. Who decided on that close-cropped hairstyle the "woman" wears and that bottled shade of black? Dr. Endrra? His assistant is nothing more than a hollow skin, all surface and no guts, mere window-dressing for a project so secret that it can’t have a single human employee.

When they finally arrive at his office, the man doesn’t get up to greet Mallory. Grey-haired, hard-mouthed, and wearing glasses with lenses so thick they enlarge his eyes to owl-like proportions, he barely looks up from the computer screen as he waves her toward a nearby chair. The contents of her questionnaire are _that_ interesting.

“We’ll have to run a few tests to confirm—nothing too intrusive, mind you—but I can see from the data you’ve so kindly provided that you are in perfect health. Other than a few complaints of a more psychiatric nature, that is.”

Mallory blinks. There’s no introduction, no small talk. The doctor wastes no time before getting down to business.

Fine. Two can play that game. It’s not like she’s got any time to beat around the burning bush if she plans to harness the power of God and escape this horrible, Michael-less timeline that she’s trapped in.

“By psychiatric problems, you’re referring to my recurrent nightmares? The only good thing about those is that they never happen in reality. Though, sometimes, I wish they would. Then, I would know that I still have the gift.”

Dr. Endrra’s predatory eyes flick up from the screen momentarily, scanning her face for any sign of dishonesty. He’s startled by her directness, and all ears.

“Your gift? Yes, you’ve written about it here, and in such marvellous detail. Let’s see. You had precognitive dreams ever since you were a small child. Witnessing a car crash before it happened… A premonition of the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015… Then a few minor lottery winnings, a Word Cup upset, that kind of thing. The dreams suddenly stopped a year ago, is that right? No warning.” 

Mallory nods. It’s a fabrication, of course, but she’s not about to tell him the real reason she wants to gain full and deliberate use of her gift. For all Dr. Endrra knows, _effective_ dreaming, the kind that alters the very fabric of reality to suit the will of the dreamer, is impossible. How, then, can this shady researcher take her farther on that road than she’s ever been, and teach her to control her gift, to dream what she wants into being?

“Let me see if I understand you correctly. By participating in my study, you hope not only to restore the precognitive abilities you once had, but to amplify these abilities to the point of being able to predict the future with lucid dreaming?”

She nods again. It’s a tall order. A miracle, even. She’ll settle for nothing less.

“I can’t guarantee this outcome. That’s in the contract you’ll be asked to sign.”

He’s watching her with keen interest now, like she’s a rare butterfly specimen he can’t wait to pierce through the abdomen and display behind glass. She doesn’t mind.

“I’ll sign the contract, Dr. Endrra. I want to start the procedure as soon as possible.”

A tremor of excitement travels through the man at her words. His left hand drifts toward a small device near the edge of his desk that emits a rhythmic series of flickers and beeps. It’s some kind of polygraph machine, Mallory guesses, a prototype more advanced than any currently on the market. It’s a strange combination, the shabby state of the “institute” and the ultra-high tech it contains. The five or so lifelike robots she’s glimpsed around the building don’t belong in a land of warehouses and strip malls. They belong in a tech juggernaut deep within Silicon Valley. Who's financing this place?

When the doctor notices her noticing the device, he tries to sound kinder, but it doesn’t come naturally. He sounds like a shark looks when it’s trying to smile.

“You’re imagining a surgical procedure, most probably, but what I do is totally noninvasive. We’ll be putting you inside a machine to stimulate the right pattern of neural oscillations for oneiric precognition. Now, I’d like to start the polygraph, please, if you have no objections.”

“I don’t.”

He wants to know that she’s telling the truth about her abilities, rusty as they are. It’s only fair.

“Good. Let’s begin.”

She rolls up her sleeve for the armband to slip over her bicep. A small bracelet connected to the device goes around her wrist. With all the powers at her disposal, it should be easy enough to fool a polygraph, even a very advanced one. There’s a slight problem, however. Mallory’s got a head full of defensive spells and none to calm down her vitals. It takes a moment for her breathing and pulse to slow and her blood to cool.

The first few questions are innocent enough. The doctor asks what she had for breakfast, what flight she took to get to Boston from California, and in what year and city she was born.

The next few questions concern how she came to have dreams that weren’t regular dreams, the junkspace of everyday life, but prophetic visions, a psychic force beyond the pale.

So far, so good. Her performance is ringing no alarm bells. Everything that she says contains some truth.

The terrain gets somewhat rockier and steeper when she starts talking about the specifics of her dreams and the events they foretold. Mallory is able to bluff for a while just by breathing and clearing her mind of most fears and anxieties. She can’t see what her interrogator is looking at on the computer screen, but a quick aura-reading lets her know that Dr. Endrra believes her. The lie is working.

Until it’s not.

Mallory can sense when he trips the gas and it begins to fill the room through an air shaft in the wall. There’s no sound and no smell, yet the poison is there, filling her nostrils and mouth.

In a happier time at Miss Robichaux’s, her friend Queenie claimed to know a spell that would let the caster remain underwear for an hour or more without a single intake of air. Mallory had no desire to learn it, and now she regrets that decision.

“I’d like to start the final round of questions now. I’ve provided a little chemical incentive for truthful answers without telling you, Miss Mallory, because it’s always better when the subject doesn’t expect it. If you still have no objections?”

She has magic in her veins. Why doesn’t she use her mind to choke the life of out of this strange doctor? It would be easier than flexing her knuckles and delivering a traditional punch to his jaw. Yet she holds off, on instinct, even as she feels the gas beginning to work its mundane magic, breaking down her will to keep secrets and loosening her tongue.

“Do your worst. I have nothing to hide.”

“No? How gratifying to hear that. The question is: have you ever exhibited supernatural powers of any kind, apart from your precognitive ability? Things like telekinesis, pyrokinesis, teleportation, bilocation, and mind control.”

Mallory manages to stay quiet despite the sudden urge to answer in the affirmative. It would be a terrible idea, admitting to this clearly unethical man that she has a whole arsenal of abilities beyond what he’s looking to investigate. She’s too close to give up.

“Just answer honestly. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Tell me, Mallory: as far as you know, are you a witch?”

Then it suddenly clicks for her, how to keep her secret without betraying herself, one way or another.

“No,” she answers in full confidence. “I’m not a witch.” 

He leans in closer. “Really? Are you sure? I could tell that you were different from the moment you stepped through the door. Just how different are you?”

 _Pretty fucking different_ , she thinks.

This Dr. Endrra doesn’t seem to know much of anything at all, which doesn’t bode well for his machine. Being a seer is a lot more common than being a witch. There are many non-witches with the gift of prophecy. At the same time, certain witches possess only one magical gift: the wonder of divination. Dr. Endrra has no interest in the latter.

Polygraph passed, they make their way down another set of corridors to the laboratory itself. Fancy-looking equipment is everywhere, but one object in particular draws her eye: a sensory deprivation tank.

“You put your subjects in there?”

The doctor runs a hand along the metal flank of the device, which reminds Mallory of an iron maiden. Two more female robots are milling around the tank, fiddling with some computer controls and ignoring Mallory. All the research staff in his lab seems to come from the same manufacturer, the only one in the world with the required technology.

Kineros.

Is Dr. Endrra aware that she knows his assistants are robots? He seems to have bought her story about not being a witch, which is technically true. He’s too excited to worry now in any case.

“We can do a test run, if you like. The changing room is to your left. There’s a bathing suit in there.”

The procedure is simple enough. First, he’ll attach a few electrodes to Mallory and stimulate the right pattern of neural oscillations for precognitive activity. Then, she’ll enter the tank to eliminate all sensory input until she’s totally immersed in the dreamworld. He’ll give her some directions regarding what she _may_ see in her dreams, but he won’t be guiding her unconscious mind towards any particular vision. Any visions of the future are likely to be personal to the seer, the doctor explains, unless there’s a major event on the horizon that affects many people, such as a devastating earthquake or a terrorist attack. Mallory’s not interested in seeing anything like that, of course. Her mission is to reshape reality until it springs back like a rubber band to what it was before the Tempus Infinituum spell was performed in 2015.

She doesn’t stop to think that time itself has moved on, with or without Michael in it. All she knows is that it’s time to act. This is her best chance to bring him back, but she can’t do it on Dr. Endrra’s terms, not while he’s at the controls.

When she returns from the changing room, wearing a simple black swimsuit, the two robots pretending to be women attach the electrodes to her head and upper body, spacing them about an inch apart so there’s no interference. The lid on the iron maiden is open. Soft blue light glows from inside the tank, beckoning her to enter. The water is warm and cloudy with dissolved salts. She’s about to dip her toe in when she stops, much to the good doctor’s chagrin.

“Who’s financing your research, Dr. Endrra? You don’t seem to be affiliated with any government or university.”

His head quirks up at her question, surprised at her boldness. The time for questions is past. He’s impatient to close the lid and let her sink into dreamful slumber for the night. It's well past midnight.

“How observant of you. Our research has silent supporters in the tech sector as well as in the government. We may be little known now, but all that will change sooner than you think.”

“You keep saying ‘we,’ and yet I don’t see anyone here but you, Doctor. Your entire staff has come off the Kineros assembly line.”

Dr. Endrra stops typing on his console and gives her a long, hard look, like he’s seeing her for the first time.

“Let me guess: the ‘we’ you keep referring to is a shadowy organization called the Cooperative.”

“The what? Cooperative? Never heard of it.”

Mallory had the upper hand— _had_. She’s lost it, now. The doctor laughs in her face as the tension drains from his body.

“Someone’s been feeding you bad information, little girl.”

_Little girl._

It takes a moment to come up with a strategy. Is there time for a little spontaneous divination? Probably not. The two repurposed sexbots are staring with those dead eyes of theirs now, totally still. It’s like a switch has been flipped, turning bland friendliness into a kill command. They move to grab her arms at the same time as the doctor reaches inside his jacket for a gun.

“If you’d done your research properly, you’d know that our benefactors call themselves the Consortium,” he tells her. “Stand up, Miss Mallory. Do it slowly. Make any sudden movements and _this_ little thing is liable to discharge.”

Mallory isn’t terribly shocked to be staring down the business end of an old-fashioned revolver. There was always going to be more to the good doctor than met the eye. His first real mistake was asking the wrong questions.

“The Consortium? That’s new. Where I come from, the Illuminati call themselves the Cooperative. Tomorrow, they’ll be calling themselves the Coalition, or the Consilium, or the Conferedacy. So many possibilities.”

The revolver is pointed squarely at her chest now, but the man won’t shoot her. He needs her alive for his experiments. The “women” are holding her by shoulders now, leaving bruises where their fingers press into the skin with mechanical force. She lets them.

“Who are you? Not a Salem descendant, I hope. For your sake.”

Witch or no witch, the doctor still plans to put her in the iron maiden once a cocktail of drugs has been administered.

“Answer the question, Miss Mallory. Who _are_ you?”

“I’m nobody,” she replies, and in that moment, she means it. Nobody should have the power to alter the very fabric of reality like she can, theoretically, and for what? To return the Antichrist to a world that he wanted to destroy. To set him back on the same path of destruction that he’s hard-wired to seek, at least with that part of his soul that’s pure darkness.

It’s the height of folly, her mission. It’s like rearming a defused bomb, or replanting a mine field. But what choice is there?

It’s so strange to think of it now. Mallory didn’t know Michael for that long. She never particularly liked him. He horrified her at first. Then, she began to feel pity for him, followed by a chilling kind of affection.

Was it love? _Is_ it love? Maybe, maybe not. But for the past few years, getting Michael back is all that Mallory has been able to think about, dream about, plan about, obsess about. Interested only in suffering, the keener the better, she walked her _via dolorosa_ until it became her life’s purpose.

With barely a flick of her wrist, Dr. Endrra’s gun flies out of his hand and clatters to the floor. The man falls to his knees, frozen there. The robots are made of sterner stuff, but they too stand no chance when the will of a strong woman is applied. It’s easy once she remembers that a robot doesn’t have a mind. It has numbers. Concilium can only charm a creature whose brain is made of neurons, not a copy whose titanium skull is full of circuits and coolant.

To control the machines, Mallory uses divination to pull out those numerical sequences that make them tick, then rewrites their code to obey her orders alone. Luckily, they already know how to operate the iron maiden, which removes all need for Dr. Endrra to be awake (or alive?) for the procedure. The spell that she casts on the good doctor will knock him out for the better part of three days. If he dies of thirst in that time, well, so what? The spell that she casts on laboratory will keep anyone and everyone from entering, whether robot, Satanist, or police swat team. It'll hold for long enough as she falls asleep in the tank—and, if all goes well, dreams herself out of this hellish timeline.  

Will it work, this effective dreaming thing, once her brain is stimulated in just the right way? It _has_ to. The universe gets no other choice than to make it work.

Mallory steps into the tank and submerges herself in the water that cradles her body like amniotic fluid. When the lid closes, she’s floating in an infinite void with no stars to navigate by. She lets it all go—her body, her mind, anything that impedes her entry into the dreamworld. Soon, the dream will be all that exists, the only reality, so she has to dream right.

Mallory vows to do it better, the second time around.

This time, she won’t let Michael harbor any delusions of Satanic grandeur or walk the path of destruction.

This time, she’ll conquer the devil that’s killing the sweet boy inside.

This time, she’ll root out the evil until there’s nothing left but his humanity, which she pictures like a faintly glowing ember. She’ll blow on the ember, feeding it oxygen until it’s a roaring, godly fire.

She dreams of flames.  

 

*****

It’s not the sun that wakes her. The room that she’s in has no windows, but she doesn’t notice that insignificant detail at first.

When Mallory comes to, she’s no longer in the sensory deprivation tank at the Global Institute for Oneiric Precognition. No, she’s in—

_Where the fuck is she? This can’t be Heaven, though it feels like it._

She can’t make sense of her surroundings at first. Oddly, it doesn’t bother her that she’s entirely naked in a four-poster bed fit for a king. As she sits up to look around, her bare skin rubs against black pillows and sheets so soft they feel like the caress of an angel’s wing.

And she’s not alone in that enormous bed. A long-haired man lays beside her, his face turned away.

_Michael._

He’s so familiar yet so different from what Mallory remembers. The silken locks that spill over the pillow are softer than the softest sheets. His hair is the color and sheen of burnished bronze. She brushes it aside to reveal the creamy expanse of a strong back, and watches as thick cords of muscle move under the skin of his shoulders. Michael shifts in his sleep.

She did it. She brought him back.

Mallory found a new timeline. Or created it. 

She doesn’t know how it happened exactly. Events seems to have reordered themselves to repair the second timeline created by Cordelia’s spell. In this universe, Michael is warm and alive. He’s no longer a body pathetically twisted in the middle of the road, no longer a charred remnant of a witch’s ire, no longer a forgotten name once cursed by a hateful world. As she buries her nose in his hair, luxuriating in the familiar scent, it tickles her cheeks and she cries.

Mallory doesn’t mean to, but she can help it. The floodgates of emotion have been opened, and it’s a joyous release of all that she’s kept bottled up. Tears stream down her face sideways as she traces a finger down Michael’s back, dragging her nail along the bumps and dips of his spine as if mapping the rocky terrain of home after a long absence. Every touch pulls him closer to consciousness, closer to her.

Her arms encircle his waist, finding a somewhat leaner, harder body than she remembers. It’s hard to believe that the other Mallory has been here this whole time, with this new Michael. Why can she remember? And who is the other version of her, anyway? She’s just woken up in this brand new reality and so her new memories haven’t caught up with her old ones yet, like a train running on a parallel set of tracks.  

Michael is stirring to wakefulness.

“Mallory… you can’t _possibly_ be ready for more, you little minx, not after the night you’ve had. Even angels have limits.”

Leaning back into her embrace, he purrs in satisfaction and quickly catches her smaller hands in his stronger ones. Then he flips around to face her, pinning her in place with nothing more than the intensity of his ice-blue gaze, which is as startling as she remembers. 

“What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

The lazy smile curving his plump lips falls instantly, replaced by a frown. There’s a passing look of impatience there as well, mixed with the love and concern, and though she can’t remember any events from this new timeline—not yet, anyway—she can feel in her bones that her counterpart did something to annoy him.

“Nothing’s wrong,” she whispers. “For the first time in forever, everything’s right.”

Michael grasps her face with both hands. With infinite gentleness, his lips descend on her own. The kiss is chaste, subdued, but as blood flows into her most intimate place, she realizes that she is sore down there. _Very_ sore.

Blushing at the delicious ache in her cunt, the sensitized nerves humming at the mere suggestion of more ache to come, Mallory initiates a deeper kiss, which he returns with the promise of fire—an old passion rekindled. Her clit is tender too, abused by pleasures that she can’t recollect. A fat tear rolls down her cheek. Michael wipes it away with his thumb. Another two follow, and this time he catches them with his lips and a darting tongue.

When he draws back to examine her eyes for more signs of distress, his brows furrow in a way that she’s never seen before. It could be a trick of the candlelight, but the sharp planes of his beautiful face are even sharper now, his cheekbones so deadly they could cut steel. Golden hair tumbles to his shoulders and makes him look cherubic, yet it couldn’t be further from the truth.

“I’m glad that you’re finally coming around,” he says and kisses her again. She has no idea what he means, but in the heat of the kiss, it doesn’t really matter. She nearly sobs into his mouth as their tongues battle for dominance, and he seems to drink it in, like a vampire—her passion, but also her grief. Gone is the crybaby Antichrist from the earlier timeline. _This_ Michael is different: older and wiser, colder and calmer, less volatile, more calculating.

What dark smithy of the soul forged his new personality? She doesn’t stop to wonder, though she should.

Michael pulls the silk covers off her naked body, exposing her to the cool air in the cavernous room that she never bothered to examine. She moves to cover herself with her hands, then stops; why would she hide from him? In this and every other timeline, he’s already memorized every inch of her skin with every available sense (and a few others that humans never evolved).

“You can’t really expect me to believe that you were crying out of sheer happiness,” he drawls, hands roving over all the exposed flesh—slowly, deliberately, like he intends to make her beg for more contact. “What’s the real reason?”

Mallory is unsure how to answer. A strong hand wraps around her neck for incentive. His touch is soft and erotic, not meant to frighten, not really; and yet her cunt throbs at the thought of real danger as she imagines that hand constricting her airway until she struggles to breathe.

 _If you lie to me, I will know_.

Hearing how she moans in spite of herself as his fingers close around her throat, he spies his advantage. His other hand finds her slick folds in a fluid motion, and a single finger slips easily into the tight space. He smiles at how eagerly she unravels. 

But Mallory isn’t helpless. She never was. As much as her libido thrill to thought of her being overpowered in the bedroom, the power coiling in her gut has other ideas. The ethereal wellspring is normally buried deeper, harder to access when she performs a spell. Now, however, her fingertips vibrate in readiness at the mere possibility of doing magic, as if the latter had a mind of its own.

She’s more powerful in this timeline. Then again, so is Michael.

“I dreamt that I was completely at the mercy of a mad scientist,” she lies, or tells a half-truth. “He put me in this flotation tank, and it was terrifying. I had no control of my body. I didn’t even have a body. There was no line between where I ended and the water began.”

Michael regards her with narrowed eyes. His grip around her throat loosens. Fingers trail over her chest until they find a nipple to pinch, hard.

“A dream upset you that much? How old are, Mal? Three? Five?”

“Look who’s talking.”

He’s no longer smiling as he adds a second finger and pumps with more force. It’s almost enough to hurt Mallory, given the ruined state of her cunt, but it only heightens her pleasure. She’s unembarrassed by the wet sounds his fingers make as they collides with her inner walls, curving intuitively toward her G-spot like it’s a homing beacon.

“Sensory deprivation? That’s giving me a few ideas.”

Michael stops, hand still sheathed in her core. Mallory whines at the loss of friction, bucking her hips to chase the escaping fingers. Left sopping and empty, she watches as he brings the glistening fingers to his mouth. Once he’s had a taste of her essence, he taps her lips to open for the two digits that were just pumping her.

“What’s the best way to conquer your fear?”

“Through exposure to the thing that makes you afraid?”

“Exactly. We could start small. A blindfold, perhaps. If you’ll allow it.”

Of course, she’ll allow it. Without meaning to, Mallory’s crying again, and he’s kissing her tears away, and cradling her head against his chest.

“Do you trust me?”

She nods, swallowing. Michael has been gone for so long that she’d consent to virtually anything he wanted to do. She’d beg for it, probably, get down on her hands and knees. A blindfold seems harmless enough.

“Good girl.”

Her head lifts off the pillow and a black silk scarf appears out of nowhere, slithering snake-like around her eyes to deprive her of sight. Michael’s weight lifts off the bed and he pads to the other side of the room, doing Satan knows what there. He’s gone for a good minute and a half, and when he returns, a few whispered Latin words make her rise off the bed a couple of feet.

For a moment there, she’s back in Dr. Endrra’s flotation tank, weightless, bodiless, stripped of control. Then, just as she’s starting to panic, a dozen lengths of silk fly out of nowhere to wrap around her arms, legs, torso, and neck. Her wrists are bound together and pulled over her head, while her legs splay open for easy access. Afloat in the air, she is visible, and touchable, from all sides—this is the pose he likes her in, apparently. She can literally _feel_ his eyes admiring the view.

“What are you waiting for?” She taunts, trying not to sound desperate. “Do your worst.”

A current of warm air strokes her folds, migrating up to her clit like a ghostly touch. Wetness pools between her legs at the certainty that Michael is near, his face inches away. His exhaled breath tickles her cunt. Fascinated, he’s watching it like it’s a hot-house flower whose petals open once every decade.

“How you manage to look more magnificent every time I see you is a mystery for the ages. Not even the false God could solve it, and he’s the one who created you.”

Her core still aches from all those forgotten pleasures. The Michael of her recollection is the insecure and angry boy from the bookstore, the one who came uninvited to Michigan because he couldn’t bear to be away from her for twenty-four hours. He's also the simulated Michael from her personal hell, the one crowning with her metal thorns in the Satanic megachurch. She tries not to think about that one.

Without her memories back, Mallory knows little about the present state of their relationship. She feels that the last few years have been rocky but passionate, and that she’s cried a lot during that time, and that Michael is more possessive than before. A trace of mistrust colors their interactions, but that’s nothing new.

"Michael! Go slower."

When he begins touching her again, she squirms in her restraints. His fingers are back inside her with a vengeance as his mouth descends on her clit, sucking so viciously that she fears he’ll consume it. When that becomes too unbearable, he switches to worshipping the little nub with his tongue, as if to soothe the pain he inflicted. With one hand occupied with her pussy, the other is free to explore, ghosting over the curve of her ass until his mouth detaches from her clit and he dives, literally _dives_ as into a body of water, plunging his whole face into—

“Michael!!!”

She’s not ready for that.

Mallory bucks violently in her silken harness to escape the mouth that seeks to pry open her ass like a ripe fruit. He reacts in surprise. Clearly, the Mallory from this timeline was more sexually adventurous.

“You’re in a weird mood today,” he mutters against her thigh, returning to his earlier post. Fuelled by her denial, he really throws himself into the task, digging his rings into the soft flesh of her hips as he eats her pussy like the survival of the planet depends on it—though, knowing Michael, it’s more likely the opposite.

Barely able to form a coherent thought, she still notes the improvement in his technique, compared to the last time she let him do this at Ms. Mead’s house. The younger Antichrist was preternaturally skilled at the act, but the fully matured, long-haired Michael? Boy Wonder couldn’t match him in his wildest dreams.  

Mallory literally can’t take anymore as her orgasm rounds a curve and drives off the proverbial cliff, ascending to another plane of existence altogether. She’s falling, she’s flying, and she’s cumming with an animal cry and a hazy awareness that Michael is still eating.

 _Dear God._ _Or Satan._

In the quaking aftermath of her first climax, he’s nowhere near ready to stop, but when he finally does—only because she begs him to, not because he’s had his fill of her pussy—the silk threads that bind her don’t loosen. No. Mallory is still a juicy fly caught in a spider’s web, her legs parted wide in the air, her cunt glistening for all to see.

Michael disappears from earshot again. That’s the thing about him that’s a constant across all timelines, Mallory thinks: he torments and soothes in equal measure. Neither angel nor demon, he exists in some liminal space between binary categories. “Good” and “evil” simply don’t apply to him, and neither do “considerate” and “inconsiderate.”

His inner darkness is stronger than she remembers—that’s how she knows when he’s back in the room. The poisoned aura drags behind him like a shadow, or soul-slime.

“Now _this_ is how I like to see you, my beloved.”

Without so much as a muttered spell, she begins the descend.

“Needy… Compliant… Uncomplaining…”

With every word he utters, a few more bindings come loose. She drops on the bed, but he doesn’t set her free.

“Isn’t it so much better when you comply with my wishes than when you defy me in front of my subjects?”

He’s running a sticky finger in a slow, sinuous line from the pulse point in her neck down to her navel through the valley between her breasts, then wiping his hand clean on her belly.

“..though perhaps I should be grateful that you didn't come to dinner yesterday, the dinner you refused to attend due to, what did you call it? Religious objections.”

Desert-hot breath strokes her navel and then travels up her body until there’s stubble against her left nipple. He seizes the breast roughly and guides it into his mouth before she has time to object. But why would she object? In taking away her sight, the blindfold has sharpened all her other senses. She moans when he gives her other breast the same treatment, burying his face in the soft flesh like he’s trying to devour it whole.

It doesn’t end his tirade, though. He's still angry when he comes up for air.

“No one is violating your religious freedom,” he whispers as he moves into position between her legs, brushing his heavy cock against her thigh so she knows to expect it. “No one is telling you to sell your soul to my Father. Everyone knows that it’s not who you are. But even angelic beings show up to dinner.”

She doesn’t know what the hell Michael is talking about, and doesn’t pretend to.

“Elizabeth Holmes was so looking forward to meeting you last night,” is the last thing he says on the subject. Teasing her folds with the tip of his leaking cock, he enters her with a low groan. “ _Fuck_ , I swear you’re getting tighter every day.” Another mystery for the ages. “ _How_ are you getting tighter when all I do is—”

He doesn’t finish his sentence. It dies on his lips because he’s no longer a man, endowed with speech, but a beast that communicates in grunts, hisses, howls, and other predator sounds. Pounding into her like a rabid dog let out of its cage, Michael is biting her shoulder like someone forgot to muzzle him.

“You’re trying to kill me with how good you feel,” he slurs, half-embarrassed, like he won’t last long at this rate, like it’s never happened before. Mallory isn’t doing much better. Silky-soft hair brushes the sides of her face as he works her open down below, and if her restraints allowed it, she would bury her fingers in those golden strands. Next time.

Still blind as a bat, she concentrates on taking every inch of him, savoring the sweet stretch of a cock that she _swears_ has gotten bigger over time. Maybe it just feels that way from how deeply he penetrates on every thrust, so deeply that fresh tears come unbidden to her eyes, collecting in her lashes and wetting the blindfold.

Michael doesn’t notice. Finishing first, he spends himself in a few violent spasms but keeps pumping. Mallory follows soon after he paints her inner walls milky white, the pleasure too intense to delay once she hears _that_ moan in her ear. The darkness inside him explodes into her awareness, its shadow lengthening like it might swallow her whole. 

Her restraints and blindfold are finally gone. Admiringly, even lovingly, Michael examines the bruises the silk left on her wrists as they begin to heal from his magic, but Mallory stops him. She wants the purple marks intact, a souvenir of their first coupling in the new timeline.

A tapping from outside the room startles her.

“Is someone at the door?”

She bolts upright and sees it open a crack. Whatever is out there, Michael’s expecting it.

“Relax, it’s just Nevermore.”

A raven flies in. Or a thing that looks like one.

Nevermore is realistic enough to fool the eye yet lacks the energetic signature of a living being. It reminds her of the robotic staff in Dr. Endrra’s laboratory. That feels like a lifetime ago now, though it’s been less than a day.

The bird perches on the edge of the four-poster bed, and Michael reaches forward to take the scroll from its left leg. The presence of a smart phone on his night table suggests that the Sanctuary has an electronic network for instant communication. This message must have arrived from somewhere beyond that network.

Wait. the Sanctuary? Since when does she know to call it that?

It means that her second memories are starting to return. She trembles, half-afraid of what she’ll discover.

“Who’s that from?”

Michael sneers at the neat calligraphic script.

“Who do you think?”

The relevant facts are in her mind already, buried under all the rubble of a time-quake. _Just get in there and access them_ , she tells herself.

Mallory closes her eyes, envisioning a door. The key to the door is in her pocket. All she needs to do is slip the key in the lock and let the metal teeth click into place.

The wood creaks open with a shudder. _Come and see_ , whispers a voice from nowhere. The syllables wrap around her soul like a toxic miasma, siphoning off the clean air in her lungs, pumping them full of poison.

Memories are coming in patchy. The past three years and four months are like an elaborate quilt with more than a few missing pieces of cloth.

There are flashes of carnage and devastation. A nuclear winter, a snowfall of ashes. A split of the infinitesimally small causing a mess so catastrophically large, it will take millennia to clean up.

The timescale isn't human anymore. Her mind rebels. Her reason strains to its breaking point.

The nuclear apocalypse was the brainchild of Mutt and Jeff, a pair of die-hard Satanists who resented the slow unfolding of the magical apocalypse that Michael had in mind.

When Michael got the real Mead back from limbo, Mead 2.0 was slated for demolition. Before that could happen, the heartbroken robot escaped to the roboticists who built her. With her help, Mutt and Jeff activated the Dead Hand, a Soviet-era guidance system that triggered the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles all over the planet. This happened four months ago.

Michael was furious when he heard about the incoming missiles. With only a few hours to plan his next move, he was lucky that the Sanctuary was already fully operational, being none other than the Satanist complex where he first met Mallory, a miniature city built in a series of caverns under the Denver airport. No planes are landing there now, and none are taking off. Denver itself is a crater. An oozing, festering abbess. A city-shaped hole.

Being good is a tall order for the son of the devil, a creature literally bred for evil. That’s something that Michael was born into, so it’s hardly fair to resent the occasional relapse. The nuclear holocaust is a lot more than a relapse, however. It's no momentary loss of control, a raised knife slipping across the ready throat of a sacrifice. Even if it wasn’t his doing exactly.

Michael had no idea that the world would end when it did. Did he mourn its loss by fire? Did he regret being the catalyst for its destruction? Not exactly. What he mourned was the loss of an “authentic” apocalypse powered by magic, not science. A pipe dream perhaps, but _his_ pipe dream.

Once he's read the raven's message, he flicks it away and it burns up in midair. Beady avian eyes follow him as he paces the room, naked as the day he was born in a bed of blood. He’s never been more beautiful to Mallory, or more fully himself, in all his Satanic grandeur. And yet she can’t appreciate the reunion anymore, her mind occupied with darker visions than she can bear. The shock of the end hasn’t even registered yet.

“The Vatican wants to parlay. The Pope thinks that having Cordelia on his side gives him leverage. Can you believe that son of a bitch?”

The “bitch,” of course, is the Catholic Church. As soon as Michael says it, she remembers.

The Church is a cockroach, a hardy organism that no atomic weapon can eradicate. Madison had told the coven what she heard from Billie Dean Howard back at the Murder House, about the Pope having a box that contained knowledge of the Antichrist, a child born of human and spirit that would usher in the end times. Armed with this knowledge, the Vatican was ready to go underground, then reemerge post-Apocalypse, playing the unlikely role of a revolutionary force. By the time the bombs hit, they were already holed up across the state in Colorado Springs, having relocated from Rome to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, a former military base that housed the United States Space Command.

Michael strolls to the heavy oak desk painted the same black as everything else in the room. Mallory hasn’t examined it, or hasn’t wanted to. It’s grand and baroque, decorated in obsidian and marble and the finest damask silk, as befits it occupant. That occupant is picking up a quill to write a new message on a clean scroll. Once the ink dries, he rolls it up and calls to the raven to extend its left leg.

“Nevermore, please fly this to the Pope right away.”

If the Vatican has joined forces with the surviving witches, Michael may be in trouble. _They_ may be in trouble, Mallory reminds herself. Because she’s not with Cordelia and the others. In the irradiated twilight of the world, she’s chosen the wrong side.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Enderr/Endrra” means “dream” in Albanian. Sensory deprivation tanks appear a lot in sci-fi. I haven’t seen “Stranger Things” but did watch “Fringe.” The idea of the Catholic Church as the only institution to survive a nuclear apocalypse was explored wonderfully by Walter M. Miller, Jr. in his 1960 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.


	12. The Garden of Earthly Delights

Much like she once stood at the top of the stairs at Miss Robichaux’s to survey the crop of new witches every September, so Madison stands on a balcony overlooking the reception area of the New Vatican, a former U.S. military installation known as the Cheyenne Mountain Complex.

Queenie and Zoe are standing on either side, killing time before the council is scheduled to meet that afternoon. Church types aren’t invited to Cordelia’s meetings, an executive decision that Madison fully supports. Many claim to understand the true nature of the Antichrist, and yet not a single priest has the first clue about how to deal with one Michael Langdon.

“For a place they call the Holy See,” Madison tells her friends, “there’s not much to see here.”

At that moment, cardinals of all ages, sizes, shapes, and colors are filing past the three witches in their eye-catching vestments, then rounding the corner like some kind of scarlet centipede before disappearing out of view. A few of the younger ones give them furtive looks, clearly liking what _they_ see, even if they’re too shy to admit it.

The Vatican’s vow of celibacy is no more, given the dire circumstances into which the nuclear holocaust has plunged the human race. Now, the cardinals can fuck by Papal Decree. So why aren’t the witches more excited about it?

“If we can’t reverse the apocalypse, we’ll have to repopulate the Earth,” Zoe says, unhelpfully.

No one on the Salem side likes the idea of getting into bed with the Vatican, literally or metaphorically, even if it may be their last resort. Before the world went to shit, Cordelia was planning to cast the Tempus Infinituum spell, with Mallory powering the magic, with or without the Nephilim’s consent. That plan was, and remains, terribly risky. There hasn’t been a witch who's cast the managed to cast the spell in the whole history of the coven. The witches hope to God (if there is one) that they succeed where others have failed and travel back in time to restore the ruined world. Their new plan is to let Michael come to them, luring him out of his lair so that Mallory is all alone at the Sanctuary. Alone, away from that terrible influence, she will listen to reason. Or so Madison hopes.

In their quest to separate the two love birds, the witches have a trump card to play:

Miriam Mead.

Mead is looking remarkably alive and well for one burned alive at the stake, locked up in a cell under twenty 24-hour surveillance by the Swiss Guard. Luckily for the covens, the warlocks were able to bag the devious old Satanist in the nick of time before the bombs fell. In fact, Madison might go as far as to say that it’s the only truly impressive thing the warlocks have ever done. It’s a good thing that John Henry Moore just happened to be in Los Angeles at the time and in possession of a sizeable axe to grind where the older woman was concerned.

Madison sighs and takes a cigarette out of a silver case. The others give her a dirty look.

“What? I’m not smoking it,” she mumbles around the cig, which dangles, unlit, from her lip. “Leave me alone. I’m trying to think.”

She thinks. And she thinks some more.

The only reason that Mead is even here, alive enough to be a valuable player in their little war game, is because Michael and Mallory worked together to retrieve her soul from limbo.

Sure, Mallory wasn’t technically on the Antichrist’s side back then, which Madison supposes she must be now, for lack of any real evidence to the contrary. Who knows what he’s done to her, the devil boy, to make her fall under his spell?

Mead’s probably laughing in her cell as they speak, secure in the knowledge that Cordelia tried, and failed, to remove that particular chess piece from Michael’s gameboard. Even if she gets burnt at the stake again—or beaten, or hung, or drawn and quartered, or killed in any number of medieval ways the coven seems to favor—it won’t help in the larger scheme of things. Chaos has already won. 

“Listen, hoe. Christian’s still around, so why are you so pressed about the slim pickings around here?”

Queenie frowns as Madison lights that cigarette she promised not to smoke. Where is she even getting these cancer sticks? It’s not like there are still convenience stores around to replenish them at the end of the world.

“I’m thinking of you, bitch,” her friend replies. “Besides, Christian and I aren’t a _thing_ thing anymore. Let’s just say that he’s having a hard time adjusting to the New World Order.”

“Poor kid,” says Zoe, who is little more than a kid herself. Then again, each and every young witch in the coven has seen more mortal danger than all the Hawthorne shut-ins combined. “Christian will make a good dad when the time comes.”

 _Yeah, if he ever gets hard again_ , thinks Madison between hard drags from her cancer stick, like it’s a substitute for something else she’s not playing with. “Who’s talking about baby daddies, anyway? We’ve got an apocalypse to reverse.”

“Umm… the Last Pope? And everyone else at the Vatican. What if the spell doesn’t work?”

Madison’s got to admit that Zoe has a point. As one of a select group of surviving warlocks, Christian would make a far better baby daddy than a random priest who probably doesn’t know a pussy from a hole in the ground. And if you choose to believe that stronger witches and warlocks are made by combining different strains of magical DNA, then it really _is_ a no-brainer.

There’s one little problem, however. Madison’s in no rush to get knocked up, and neither are Queenie, Zoe, and any other witches from school. The council has better things to do than worry about repopulating this absolute wreck of the planet. There’s a war to fight and history to change, and time isn’t exactly on their side.

“Look, Papa Pontifex is due to arrive,” says Queenie, leaning perilously over the railing. Down below cardinals are gathering, which can only mean one thing.

Adam is the birth name of Pope Pius XIII, also called the Papa Pontifex or the Last Pope by his subjects. He’s been known to answer to “Young Pope” as well, given his resemblance to a certain character played by Jude Law on HBO.

The Last Pope is a dignified sort of person, and he’s got to be, as the final earthly representative of the one true Church. In his thirty short years on the planet, the first ten of which were spent on an Alabaman soybean farm, Adam’s acquired all the skills needed to fulfill his sacred role at the end of the world. A born schemer, Adam is particularly adept at reading people from all walks of life and ingratiating himself with any group. One group has proven resistant to his charms, however. Regardless of nationality, coven membership, or magical skill, the witches simply don’t trust him. This is even true of those whose ancestors were never burned at the stake by the Catholics.

“Where is he? I don’t see the Pope.” Zoe looks down, seeking the source of all the commotion. “And where’s Coco? Has anyone seen her today?”

Madison has moved on to her second cigarette. “No clue. She’s probably hiding. Again.”

It’s no secret that Coco, who grew up Jewish, is having a particularly hard time dealing with the priests and accepting the fate of the world. As for the Pope, he’s like a bad penny in the sense that he always turns up, sooner or later.

Wherever the Pope goes, he’s got a whole retinue around him—even in this godforsaken bunker under a toxic landscape.

When the occasion is grand enough, the Young Pope can be seen travelling through the labyrinthine hallways of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in a bejeweled litter carried by four men, with four more working security.

Queenie wonders aloud if he’ll come in his popemobile.

“No, he’ll be using his legs, like a sucker,” says Madison.

Once, when Cordelia deliberately called a last-minute meeting he couldn’t possibly be expected to attend, Adam came anyway, driving up in some kind of improvised vehicle that was a far cry from the souped-up Lincoln Continental that bore Pope Paul VI through the streets of New York in 1965.

A glorified scooter, Myrtle called it.    

As they crane their heads over the railing, none of the three witches expect to hear a familiar voice behind them.

“Double, double, toil and trouble,” drawls the Pope as he pulls down his hood and takes off his dark sunglasses. He looks like some kind of movie star trying to outrun the paps. There’s no retinue to be seen, just him and his handsome face.

“There’s three of us, dumbass,” replies Madison. “Can’t you count?”

Queenie cringes, hard. The Pope is quoting _Macbeth_ , but there’s no point in enlightening Madison to her mistake. What good would an education be to the ex-actress now? It’s the End Times, and the human race has sunk low indeed.

“Why are you sneaking up on us, anyway? Shouldn’t you be down there, where the action is?”

“I think the action is in the meeting that you ladies are about to have with Cordelia.”

Madison scoffs.

“Did your invite get lost in the mail?”

“You know as well as I do that his Holiness wasn’t invited.”

Zoe doesn’t plan to cut him any slack, either.

The Pope rolls his eyes at their rudeness as he puts his sunglasses back on, probably so they can’t see his hurt feelings.

“Very funny. Cordelia _will_ want to invite me to your next meeting once she hears about the message I’ve received for your dear old friend, the Antichrist.”

This peaks their collective interest.

“Cordelia will be interested in seeing that, alright. What did Michael say?”

God’s earthy representative isn’t in a very giving mood.

“No meeting, no information.”

The witches exchange glances, wondering how much Cordelia will object to the pontiff coming along. Better to risk it than have whatever Michael’s planning remain unknown until it may be too late to intervene.

“Fine, you can come.” Madison is the first to break the silence. “On one condition, though. Lose the shades.”

Making their way through the military corridors that now house the last dregs of humanity, they enter the war room to find everyone already assembled at a circular table. Above the table, a ring of fluorescent lights hangs low from the ceiling, as if the room’s designer were taking notes from Dr. Strangelove.

On the table is a large floorplan of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex and a map of its environs. Cordelia is bent over it along with Myrtle and two older witches of high rank. One is the Supreme of the Stregheria coven from Naples, while the other represents the newly united Obeah community from all over the Caribbean.

There are no tiny soldier figurines to move around the map, so the witches are making do with game pieces from Monopoly. The way they move these with their minds gives the Pope the heebie-jeebies.

“Must you use your devil magic in this holy place?”

Cordelia straightens when she hears his voice. Not expecting an outside presence at their meeting, she looks to the three girls who just entered for an explanation. Madison steps up to provide one.

“The Most Holy Father has received a message from Michael.”

This gets a few gasps from the attending witches, none of whom are great fans of the pontiff. Myrtle has been especially hard on the young man. Every so often, she’ll rant at his cardinals about not saving the frescoes from the Sistine Chapel.

“What does Michael want?”

The Pope makes a great show of removing his expensive sunglasses and taking out a scroll from his golden vestment (the same one that was attached to the leg of an animatronic raven). He squints at the contents of the scroll like they’re hard to decipher.

“Oh, the usual. He wants Ms. Mead, whole and unharmed, ready to go with a bow on her head. I’d advise you to hurry with your plans to secure the complex with your devil magic, because he’s planning a little visit.”

“He’s coming here? When?”

“His troops are already marching over the mountains.”

 “Troops?” asks the Stregheria witch, whose name is Anna Maria. “What troops does he have to command?”

“His army of demons, of course,” replies the Pope, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Collapsing into her chair, Cordelia looks lost in thought for a moment, with all the weight of the world’s sorrows resting on her delicate shoulders. Michael never used to have an army to command, but it makes sense that his Father would send reinforcements, given the opposition he’s facing in his conquest of the irradiated planet.

In fact, Cordelia has trouble imagining him as an organized leader (like she has to be, now) because the last time she saw Michael, he was a broken and lost little boy, grieving over the burnt remnants of his dear Ms. Mead like the whole world had gone up in flames.

“The Swiss Guard will protect the complex,” says the Pope. His favorite frenemy gets up from her chair and starts walking around the table and picking up all the Monopoly pieces scattered all over it. “We have enough firepower and holy water to counter any demonic presence.”

“Fool! They’ll eat you alive!”

The head Obeah witch, whose name is Ti-Jeanne, doesn’t like the sound of this one bit. Neither does Myrtle Snow; she’s reclining in the only armchair in the room, wearing a richer and more vibrant shade of crimson than the cardinals.

“Nonsense. The witches will take charge of this operation. Haven’t we learned anything about the dangers of male rule?”

Ti-Jeanne turns back to Cordelia.

“I don’t understand why we can’t just give him the woman. Maybe he’ll leave us alone.”

“He won’t stop until he destroys us all.”

“How can you know that, Cordelia? What if he ask us to join him?”

Taking her glasses off, Myrtle rubs her tired eyes.

“Is that option for anyone here?”

No one speaks.

“Didn’t think so.”

The Supreme looks deep in thought. She’s arranging the game pieces at strategic entry points marked on the floorplan, and identifying the areas where a breach is most likely. A private militia funded by the world’s richest Satanists is a challenge that the witches are ready to handle. The mention of demons makes her worry, however. Demons are stronger and more unpredictable than any human army. It’s anyone guess how many of the creatures Michael has managed to summon and what form they’ll take.

As for her own role in the battle, she doesn’t plan to be there when Michael arrives with his demons. No; she’ll use a very advanced spell to transport herself directly to the Sanctuary, where she can talk to Mallory in peace. That’s why it’s important that the other witches can protect the complex.

She points to a spot on the blueprint.

“This entrance is particularly vulnerable, so we’ll need more than just the Swiss Guard on it. Since you three have been training the younger witches in defensive magic, you’ll be stationed here.”

She places three Monopoly pieces on the marked spot: the Top Hat for Queenie, the Boot for Zoe, and the Thimble for Madison.

Madison looks at the map for a long moment before she opens her mouth to protest, but not about her assigned role in the battle.

“Why does Zoe get to be the Boot? That should be me.”

“You’re the Thimble,” replies Cordelia, who is really starting to show her age these days. There are white streaks in her hair that appeared overnight when the bombs fell and dark circles under her eyes that look more permanent by the day. The last thing she needs is an argument with Madison about game pieces. “If you’re done complaining about bullshit, let’s figure out who to post at the cargo entrance. It could be a job for the fox witches, if Madame Noriko has no objections.”

The dignified Japanese lady sitting apart from the other witches nods without looking up from her knitting. She’s listened to the whole conversation without uttering a word. _Stupid Americans_ , she must be thinking.

Cordelia sets down the Lantern, the Cannon, and the Battleship for the Kyoto coven.

“Thank you, Madame Noriko. Now, as for the helipad, that’s another vulnerable position. We could station a few witches outside if they wear the right gear, but it’s still risky.”

The base has helicopters and smaller aircraft, with more than enough fuel to fly them across short distances for the next few years. The last thing anyone wants is Michael and his forces taking out their ability to fly without magic.

“They get the Battleship and the Cannon, but I get the Thimble? Something’s wrong with that picture, Cordelia. You don’t believe in me.”

If Madison’s still salty about the game piece chosen to represent her on the board, she’s not the only one. The Pope is looking askance at the Wheelbarrow that Cordelia has placed smack dab in the middle of the complex, thinking he’ll be safe there if Michael breaks through their external defenses. Adam isn’t happy at all. The Wheelbarrow is meant to remind everyone in the room that his Holiness is carried around in a heavily ornamented litter on ceremonial occasions. What Cordelia doesn’t seem to realize is that it’s hardly his choice. What does she know about the never-ending bravura performance of his holy duties?

“Would you rather be the Sack of Money? Look, it doesn’t matter who’s the Thimble, or the Racecar, or the Scottie Dog, or the whatever. Does anyone have any actual objections to the plan? Any real questions?”

Silence reigns for a moment. Then a buzz starts to build around the corners of the room. Madame Noriko has put down her knitting, which usually means that things are about to get serious.

“What about the Nephilim?” she asks. “Will she be coming too?”

“I don’t think so. It’s highly unlikely that Mallory will come with him. We’ll have to take her from the Sanctuary. She’s practically a prisoner there.”

At least, this is what Cordelia likes to tell herself in her moments of doubt. There’s absolutely no way in Hell that Mallory agrees with any of this, not after the apocalypse laid waste to any misguided dreams she once had of reforming the Antichrist. Even if there used to be some kind of emotional connection between her and the other Nephilim, it’s a thing of the past. It has to be.

Ms. Mead hasn’t told them much, but the older woman did let slip that the apocalypse wasn’t entirely her foster son’s doing. At least, not its nuclear form. Clairvoyant Bubbles McGee confirmed what their prisoner told them: the bombs were dropped without Michael’s express permission. The rogue followers who triggered the Dead Hand missile guidance system are gone, handled with extreme prejudice.

No, Cordelia is certain that Mallory isn’t on board with anything that Michael’s doing.

Unless—

Well, the Supreme doesn’t want to speculate about the morality of her former student. The important thing is to take the girl and use her to power the Tempus Infinituum. The witches will travel back in time to prevent the world’s destruction once they manage, somehow, to protect their base from Michael and his demonic reinforcements, not to mention to protect themselves from the toxic atmosphere outside the complex.

Surviving nuclear winter, possibly abducting a Nephilim, changing the time stream, restoring the word to how it used to be… the more that Cordelia thinks about it, the less she believes in her ability to pull it off.

The Pope doesn’t have a lot of confidence in her either.

“It’s clear that your Nephilim has sold her to soul to the devil. Really, Cordelia. It wasn’t enough that your covens sheltered _one_ hell spawn, you had to—”

“Silence!” Myrtle rises from her chair. “With all due respect to your Holiness, that girl is _our_ problem.” 

Zoe frowns; she doesn’t like the way the senior witches talk about Mallory. This whole mess can’t be her fault in any way.

Cordelia turns to Bubbles, who’s been unusually quiet for the whole duration of the meeting. She’s been scanning the room for any errant thoughts that the witches—even those who are trained in mental defense—can’t quite keep private.

“Ahem,” the glamorous witch clears her throat. When she has everyone’s undivided attention, she turns to Queenie. “This young woman has been in contact with our Mallory in the last few days, and she’s seen fit to keep that from us.”

Now it’s Queenie’s turn to sweat a little as she takes a ride in the hot seat.

“What? I didn’t do anything,” she protests, until a nudge from Zoe prompts her to fess up. “ _F _ine__. You all know that I’m not the best at astral projection, so it’s really weird that Mal made contact with _me_. She just projected into my room, right before I was falling asleep.”

“Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?” Cordelia has to ask.

“I’m sure. She told me that things were getting chaotic over there. That Michael is micro-managing everyone at the Sanctuary, and possibly forcing them into some kind of breeding program. He’s losing his mind, she seems to think.”

Myrtle chuckles, heartened by the news that things are going badly for Michael. “Can’t say I’m surprised. That boy never had much of a mind to begin with.”

“What else did Mallory say?”

Shifting her weight from foot to foot, the young voodoo witch looks apprehensive.

“She’s trying to change it.”

“Change what?”

“You know… _it_.”

Cordelia understands immediately what Queenie is trying to say, and so does every other witch in the room. Everyone but the Pope has been clued in to the terrifying power of Mallory’s dreams, which can change reality so imperceptibly that it’s impossible to tell if they haven’t done so ten times already, or a hundred times, or a thousand.

The girl claims that it only happened once, when she was ten years old, but Cordelia doesn’t know what to believe.

“She says that Michael doesn’t know.”

“Do we believe her?”

“Believe _what_?”

The Pope has forgotten all about the Wheelbarrow game piece and the myriad other ways he’s been insulted by the witches over the course of a meeting to which he wasn’t invited in the first place.

 _Witches! The Vatican’s in bed with witches now!_ He’ll never get over it.

And yet there’s no use asking Cordelia any more questions, now that the infuriatingly gifted women are all rising to their feet and filing out of the room in an orderly fashion.

The council meeting is over, and the witches plan to reconvene first thing in the morning to go over the latest defense plans, with or without his Holiness (ideally without, but no one tells _him_ that).

His Holiness doesn’t follow because no one invites him to. Which is the story of his life.

 *****

The last of Mallory’s memories return with a vengeance the second that Michael leaves the room. It’s a flood of new impressions; the dam has broken and now there are two Mallories in her head, both made cynical by their traumatic experiences, but cynical in totally different ways.

There’s a third Mallory in there, too, the one from the timeline that nobody tampered with. It’s no use to think of that timeline, however. It seems so distant and idyllic from where she’s standing. Was that her real life once?

In the clean timeline, Mallory experienced the loss of a lover that felt like the loss of the world. In the newest, dirtiest one, she’s lost the world and also her lover to his manifest destiny. Was the trade-off really worth it?

It’s true that Michael hadn’t wanted any of this to happen. Mutt and Jeff launched the missiles against his orders to wait, turning to the rejected Mead 2.0 for help with bypassing certain Russian passcodes. By then, it was too late to stage a magical Armageddon worthy of the name.

When Mallory questioned him about all these things, she found the small part of him that luxuriated in the death toll, even as he wished that it hadn’t been so high. Further questioning revealed that had planned to summon demons and other creatures from humanity’s worst nightmares to scour the Earth of Heaven’s influence. Two thirds of humanity would be gone, tops. The rest, Michael figured, were morally corrupted enough to keep around, for a time. He’d planned to cull them slowly and patiently over a period of some seven years, perhaps, staging a worldwide Battle Royale that only the strongest would survive.

Thankfully for Michael, the _real_ Ms. Mead, the one that Mallory helped him retrieve from limbo, is alive and well. The only problem is that she’s presently in the clutches of his enemies on the other side of the mountains. 

As her last memories slot into place, Mallory dresses in the flimsy nightgown that she found on the chair before remembering the location of her walk-in closet.

There’s so much that she remembers now. So much that the new Mallory hasn’t given a single thought.

“Mom!” I need to see you.”

Relief washes over her in waves as she sinks to the floor. Her mother is alive! Why did it take her so long to realize that?

Mallory remembered what Michael had for breakfast three weeks ago—raspberry French toast with a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal that contained too few charms—before she remembered that her mother had survived the bombs in this new timeline.

Of course, her mother survived. Even in those chaotic final hours when every missile in the Dead Hand’s arsenal launched like chain of dominos being tripped by a careless child, Michael had the presence of mind to send a private plane to Michigan and take her to the Sanctuary.  

Mallory stops on her way to the door, struck by the obvious question. Should she tell her mom that she’s not the same Mallory from yesterday?

Should she confess what horrors her dreams have wrought, despite her best intentions?

Does her mother really need to know that she regained her ability to dream _effectively_ in the Iron Maiden that transported her to a new, more terrible reality? Well, more terrible for some. Perfectly enjoyable for others.

She decides to hide the truth for the time being. No one needs to know that she’s been playing God in her sleep again. As the only _other_ person in the Sanctuary who hasn’t sold her soul to the devil in a Black Mass, her mom’s in enough danger already. Michael has assigned her a special security detail to keep her safe in this pit of vipers, human and demonic alike.

(Ugh, the demons. Mallory doesn’t want to think about _them_.)

The mother gets all this because the daughter is consort to the Antichrist. She’s feared and respected because of it, though no one understands the union. Half of Michael’s subjects seem to believe that he’s got an ulterior motive in keeping her around, a devilish purpose for her pure and unblemished soul.

“Mom, what do I do, what do I do,” she mutters like a mantra on her way to the closet, waddling a little as she’s still sore between the legs. The sweet pain comes from a combination of the erotic exertions of that morning (an intense sixty-nine session, followed by a super-slow fuck that had her cumming three times during penetration alone) and last night (an hours-long bondage session complete with silk scarves that all but destroyed the famous elasticity of her cunt). Thinking about all they’ve done since she awoke in the new timeline makes her horny. It does nothing to assuage her guilt, however.

“How can I fix this? Every new world I create is a little worse than the previous one.”

Her closet is full of black dresses. She picks out a lace-and-leather number with a few strategically placed cut-outs around the midriff and back. Mallory sighs. There’s no hiding that inner light that remains pure and unextinguished in her soul. If Mallory’s going to make a public appearance in the Sanctuary, she needs to dress the part. It’s better than sticking out like a sore thumb, moving through a sea of Satanists with her slim figure clad in ethereal white chiffon and an angelic diadem on her head. 

It’s a funny, this multiple timelines thing. A day ago, Mallory could hardly dream that she’d be living in the Sanctuary under the ruins of the Denver airport. Now, she knows its layout like the back of her hand, traversing the hallways with ease until she comes upon the place known only as the Garden.

The Garden is beneath an enormous glass dome flooded with artificial sunlight. It takes up the entirety of the second largest cave in the complex. Once you walk beneath the dome, you’re struck by the fresh air and subtropical, humid climate. All manner of lush plants grow there, from towering palms and eucalyptus trees to lush lilies, oleanders, and gardenias in every conceivable shade of pink.

Birds of paradise cut through the air above the visitors’ heads, drawing ephemeral patterns against the soft light. Hard-working bees zoom from flower to flower, pollinating them so the garden remains strong and vital. Countless snakes live in the shrubbery and slither across the ground or up the large and small tree trunks. Amphibians and fish swim through the large pond in the center of the dome, so large it’s practically the size of a small lake. Cobbled paths wind around the pond. Couples walk hand in hand, gazing out on the water, stopping every so often to smell the flowers.

On the southeastern side of the pond grows a tree, and not just any tree. Michael used magic to accelerate its growth from a tiny seed that some followers of his in the oil business brought back from the Persian Gulf. Supposedly, the seed came from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in the original Garden of Eden, which the Antichrist is trying recreate on a modest scale in his Sanctuary.

Thanks to his magical intervention, the tree is huge now. Its trunk has thickened faster than that of any other tree in the Garden, and its crown has reached so high and grown so wide that all the nearby trees look stunted in comparison. Yet, despite his immense effort to make it flower and bear fruit, Michael has yet to see to see any returns on his investment. The tree is barren of apples, refusing to bear fruit no matter what Michael does to encourage it. Maybe this is his Father’s way of saying that his little project of rebuilding the world is failing.

If only Satan weren’t in the picture!

Mallory’s heart constricts a size when she remembers how she found Michael once, passed out from blood loss in a room used exclusively for rituals. The place was pitch-black when she entered and all the candles puddles of wax. Her lover lay on the cold marble floor in a pool of his own blood, his arms still unhealed from the deep dagger wounds that he inflicted on himself to open the channel to the underworld. It took Mallory a few agonizing minutes to revive him with a jolt of her own special magic, and when he regained consciousness, all he could talk about was his Father’s refusal to speak to him. He looked so much like a child then, alone and confused about his purpose, that she didn’t have to hard to argue when he proposed a solution to Satan’s silence.

A good, old-fashioned Black Mass.

Well, Mallory didn’t argue _then_. But she’d never allow a human sacrifice to be performed under her very own nose, not even in this new, eviler world that her lover is failing to create.

In fact, Mallory was half-expecting Michael to forget about the Black Mass until he raised the subject again until a couple of nights ago.

“Mom!”

Her mother is sitting on a yoga mat under the Tree of Knowledge, eyes closed, legs crossed, and arms raised in a meditative pose. She doesn’t see her daughter arrive.

“ _Mom._ Are you asleep in a lotus position?”

The older woman’s eyes fly open and scan her daughter from head to toe.

“Why are you dressed like that? Did _he_ pick your outfit?”

“No! You know I dress myself. Unless you’d like to dress me.”

Sandra makes no effort to move. If she had her way, Daughter Dearest would be dressed in charmingly mismatched separates like Diane Keaton in _Annie Hall_. Instead, she looks like one of Dracula’s brides.

“Well, you could’ve thrown a scarf over those ugly purple marks on your neck, at the very least.”

Ugly purple marks? Mallory must remember to perform a healing spell when she gets back to her quarters. In the meantime, she pulls up her leather collar.

“I’m not going anywhere until those kids leave. Someone’s got to keep an eye on them so they don’t anything stupid, like wreck the tree.”

“Which kids?” Mallory looks in the direction she’s pointing but sees no one.

“The bad ones.”

“Mom, that sentence describes virtually everyone under a certain age in the Sanctuary. You have to be more specific because I don’t see anyone here.”

“Fine, but you’re making me say their names. James and Anna.”

Looking closer, Mallory finally sees a girl and a boy emerging from some bushes behind the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. They’re dressed identically in flesh-colored bodysuits and have glittery fig leaves affixed to their private parts. The girl wields a selfie stick and both pose for the camera. Mallory suspects that photos of the pair will be published in the weekly newsletter that everyone in the Sanctuary gets in their mailboxes, whether they want it or not.

“They’re cosplaying as Adam and Eve,” her mother explains the obvious, looking aghast at the terrible kinds of things that Michael allows in his Garden. It’s a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the young people’s purpose in the New World, and it makes her worry.

In the Old World, Anna was a con-artist who impersonated a German heiress to steal thousands from rich and poor alike. She spent two years in the clink before getting abducted and put on a private jet to Denver right before the bombs hit. Before the world went kaboom, she told the court that she wasn’t sorry about any of her scams and would do it all again if she had the chance.

James was a make-up guru with a flair for highlighter and a massive chip on his shoulder about “influencer representation.” He’s not a bad kid, really, despite what her mom thinks. A couple of scandals lost him a few million subscribers on YouTube, at the peak of his fame, but he didn’t have to worry too much about his fall from grace before the very notion of “grace” went out the window. Why Satan chose James to join the surviving elite along with his greatest vlogging rival—the infinitely more nefarious—is unclear to Mallory. As Michael likes to say, his Father works in mysterious ways.

Her mom is side-eyeing the pair.

“It’s all fun and games until that man of yours, if you can call it a man, enrolls you in a compulsory breeding program for all subjects under forty-five.” She chuckles meanly. “As if you can’t breed under forty-five, but I digress. Can you _imagine_ the look on James’ face when Michael tells him he’s got to impregnate that poor girl the old-fashioned way?”

“He’s not going to ask him that, mom.” Mallory is quick to defend Michael. Yes, there _may_ be a breeding program is in the works, because there has to be one if the New World has any hope of succeeding, but Michael wouldn’t force anyone to procreate against their will.

Would he?

Unconsciously, her hand travels to the whereabouts of her womb, stroking the thin lace covering her midsection. Michael’s always been a little obsessed with her body, lavishing attention on every inch of it, exposed and hidden. He seems to crave every part of her equally—her lips, her neck, her modestly sized breasts, the sweet curve of her ass, the dip in the small of her back, the tender flesh of her inner thighs, etc. Lately, though, he’s been more conscious of her belly, which he likes to caress in slow, contemplative lines when he thinks that she’s dosing or not paying attention.

It’s like her mother is reading her mind.

“He’s got designs on your womb, child. God only knows what monstrosity will gestate in there.”

Anger rising in her throat, Mallory makes fists behind her back without realizing it. She fights the urge to rip the yoga mat out from under the older woman. Sandra looks way too calm to be spitting bile from her lotus position. 

“A monstrosity, mom? You mean, like me a fucking _angel_ deposited in your—”

“Pipe down, Mal. The bad kids are listening. You know they live for drama.”

Her daughter looks over to where James and Anna are frolicking with their selfie stick and Instagram-ready duck faces. Sure enough, they’re no longer snapping pictures of themselves but listening to the argument that Mallory’s having with her mom. Anna is even filming it.

Fuck. That better not end up on the Cooperative’s version of YouTube.

Luckily, the con-artist puts away her camera away before Mallory has to perform any magic. When James meets her gaze, he flashes her a fakest smile and pulls his friend away.

Mallory turns back to her mother, lowering her voice.

“Listen, I can’t give you any details, but I have a plan in the works.”

“A plan? Better be a plan B—”

“For fixing the world. Just don’t tell anyone.”

“Ah.” The older woman smiles knowingly. “Just make sure you don’t break the world before you fix it. You were always so careless with your toys when you were little.” She glances back at the Sanctuary’s own bedazzled Adam and Eve. Her eyes narrow as she notes that they’re still taking selfies. “You know, Mal, there’s another reason they’re so giddy. I’m sure you’ve heard all about it.

“Heard about what.”

“Your Antichrist didn’t tell you? Maybe the boy is afraid that you’ll hate him.”

Tough chance, Mallory thinks. She’s witnessed Michael committing crimes enough times to know that she’ll stick with him, no matter what.

“Spill it, mom. I don’t have all day.”

“The life of a Satanic bride is that busy? Well, the word on the street is that Michael is planning to perform a Black Mass before he joins his forces, who are already marching on that underground compound where all the good people live.”

“He’s doing a dark ritual _and_ going after the witches? He promised not to do either.”

“Of course, he promised, darling, but the devil lies, remember?”

Mallory can feel a massive migraine coming on as all her problems converge on her at once. She feels, momentarily, like a damsel in distress from a silent movie who’s been tied to the train tracks by the mustasche-twirling villain. A whistle blows in the distance. The train’s approaching.

“How did you find about this? Who told you?”

It’s a bad sign when her mom knows something about Michael’s plans before Mallory does.

“Vanessa, your esteemed rival, was in the Garden earlier, chirping about the sacrifice. She always comes to look for apples on this ridiculous thing, and there never are any apples. I guess she’s doomed to be a dumb slut forever.”

“Mom!”

“You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if that man of yours cursed the Tree of Knowledge for being barren, like Jesus did to that poor fig on the way to Jerusalem. He’d be playing himself, our dear Michael, but he’s not smart enough to realize that. Next thing you know, he’ll be telling a mountain to throw itself into the sea—”

“ _Mom!_ Stop saying that stuff.” She stomps her foot. “You know what? I’ve changed my mind about taking a walk with you. I’m going back to have a little nap.”

“Go talk to Michael,” her mother shouts after her retreating form. “Ask him if it’s true!”

Uncomforted by anything that her mother has said, Mallory makes her way back down the path, away from the resplendent yet oddly fruitless tree on which all of Michael’s hopes are pinned. She’s about to shoot him a text when she stops, remembering that she can feel his dark energy from any point in the system of caves. It’s one of the benefits of Michael getting more powerful, she supposes; it’s like she’s got a tracking device on him and knows where he is at all times.

Following the very distinctive energy signature, she ends up in a part of the Sanctuary that caters to commerce. Sure, there are way fewer advertisements cluttering up the space and absolutely no useless commodity fetishes on display—in the absence of a capitalist economy—but it’s still the closest thing they have to a shopping mall.

Mallory walks along the promenade of shops and small businesses until she finds the location of all that radiating power. She should’ve known. It’s coming from the hair salon.

“Mallory, how are you? It’s so nice to see you again,” the owner of the salon greets her with genuine warmth. She’s always liked Mr. Gallant, who’s way too nice for the immoral hellscape that Michael’s trying to build. How did he even get here? She’s never asked. The bleached blonde is standing over Michael with a comb and a towel, having washed out the deep-conditioning treatment out of his long strawberry-blonde locks.

“Hi Gallant. I’ve been better, to be honest.”

“What’s wrong?” Michael’s grin turns into a frown. His arms are wide open, beckoning her to come to him. Mallory goes reluctantly and sits on his lap. She’s not smiling back as she moves a few strands of wet hair out of his eyes.

“Nothing, I just have a migraine.”

“I can tell you’re lying, my dear.” His tone sounds like a caress but also a warning.

She decides to be honest, though it’s not always the best policy.

“Well, I just heard a rumor. Several, actually. You’re marching on the witches after you perform a Black Mass. Is it true? You promised me you wouldn’t.”

To the great annoyance of the hairdresser, Michael has no intention of letting Mallory leave his lap; one arm tightens around his waist as the other burrows into her hair.

“Look. Circumstances have changed. Ms. Mead is still with Cordelia, and I intend to get her back before anything happens. Again.”

“Cordelia won’t harm her. You have her word.”

“How can you be sure of that? Besides…” He looks away sheepishly. “My Father has been a little silent lately. I’m hoping that a Black Mass will open the channels of communication.”

“Michael.”

“What?” Just as she expected, there’s a note of irritation in his voice. “Don’t look at me like that. You _must_ realize the nature of the operation we’re running here. My subjects expect certain sacred rituals to be performed every so often. It’s about boosting morale.”

“Why can’t you hold a feast? Or an orgy? Satan is carnal pleasure, after all.”

“You know it’s not the same.”

Mr. Gallant has steps away to give the couple a bit of space while he tidies up the salon. Mallory can tell that he’s worried, but about what? She decides to probe a little further.

“Mr. Gallant!”

The hairdresser turns back reluctantly, leaving the floor strewn with the golden curls that he trimmed off Michael’s fast-growing hair.

“Yes?”

“You’re in your early thirties. Has Michael asked you to participate in any kind of breeding program to repopulate the world?”

“Not really.”

"But you’ve heard about such a breeding program? Of others being forced to participate?”

“Um…”

“If you _are_ exempt from that program, Mr. Gallant, it’s not because of your sexuality, but because you’re the only one in the Sanctuary who knows how to do Michael’s hair.”

Michael is frowning deeply now and shifting in his chair. His nails dig into Mallory’s forearm.

“Really, darling? Is that your idea? You’ve been acting a little paranoid lately. Maybe you miss your witch friends and would like us all to be reunited as one big, happy family. Well, that’s what I want, too. It’s not like I’m some kind of sadistic maniac. I’m willing to give Cordelia and the others a seat at the table, as my obedient subjects, as long as they bend the knee.”

Mallory sighs. The witches will never bend the knee or sit at Michael’s table. Not unless his roast head is the centerpiece and there’s an apple stuck in his mouth and fresh parsley decorating the plate. But she doesn’t say that; instead, she decides to take a softer approach.

“I don’t see why a Black Mass is necessary. Who are planning to sacrifice, anyway? Not one of your followers, surely.”

“No, a Vatican spy!” A boyish grin lights up his face. “Masquerading as a former banker.”

“You can’t do this.”

“I can, and I will. What else do you do with a spy? Let him go?”

“You could, as a gesture of goodwill.”

He laughs.

“Really, Mal? I suppose that I could let him go without a radiation suit. He won’t get a mile from the Sanctuary before he’s devoured by cannibals, if his skin doesn’t burn off first.”

“It’s not funny.”

“It is.” He leans in close to whisper in her ear, now that the hairdresser has left the room to wash the tools of his trade. “And about Mr. Gallant. Once we figure out how to cultivate morally corrupted people in artificial wombs, he’ll be bred along with the rest of them.”

“Michael! They’re human beings, not cattle!” She rises from his lap and walks to the other end of the salon to examine a handheld mirror like it’s the most fascinating object in the world. “Even cattle aren’t cattle.”

“Well, they’re _my_ subjects, and I get to do with them as I please. You’re my consort, Mallory, so you better start setting a better example for the others. The only place you ever obey me is the bedroom, and that’s unacceptable.”

“That’s the only acceptable place to obey you. Next thing, you’ll ask me to sell my soul.”

“Your soul belongs to me, not my Father.”

That’s the first sane thing that Michael has said to her all week. The old Mallory would’ve been proud of him. Sanctuary Mallory is merely less exasperated. 

“Thank you for saying that.”

“You’re welcome. Now come back and sit on daddy’s lap.”

“Eww, Michael, that’s disgusting. Please don’t call yourself ‘daddy,’” she begs, then goes to him anyway.

With Gallant still out of the room, Michael’s mood is turning amorous, which isn’t that much of a chance from his normal demeanor. The old Mallory would’ve been thrown for a loop by just _how_ _sexual_ he seems in his day-to-date interactions with virtually everyone at the Sanctuary. Post-apocalyptic Michael even moves differently than the angry boy she knew from the old timeline.

He doesn’t walk and then stop. He struts and then poses.

He doesn’t pick up a wine glass to drink from it. He caresses the stem and then runs his tongue along the rim like it’s a part of his lover’s anatomy.

He doesn’t ask questions and then listen to the answers. He interrogates the other person while palming his crotch or tracing the edge of his pocket dagger as they squirm and sweat.

In the barren new world that Michael created accidentally, his every gesture is sensuous, serpentine and feline in equal measure, and pregnant with erotic possibility.

 _Pregnant_.

Mallory swallows.

When’s the last time she used contraception? She’s always fancied herself powerful enough that she can control her bodily rhythms if she puts her mind to it. But what if that’s a mistake?

What if Michael, who is equally, if not more powerful than her, has worked secret magic to implant his heir in her womb, just as her mother fears?

What if he’s enrolled her in his breeding program without her permission, simply because he believes that she loves him enough to want the same thing?

In this strange new hellscape into which she’s awoken so unwillingly, anything’s possible.

When she looks back at his face, there are tears forming in the corners of his crystal-clear eyes while a strong hand strokes glides her back, grazing the curve of her ass. 

“Michael, why are you crying? I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s just that—” His voice shakes a little as it finds a lower register. “I want everything to be perfect at the Sanctuary, and there are still people alive who oppose me. Even under my very own roof, when I’ve been so generous.”

Reluctantly, not wanting to encourage his megalomania, Mallory wipes away a free-flowing tear and then plants a soft kiss on top of his head. His hair is still wet, and so she lingers there awhile, inhaling his natural musk combined with the fruity smell of the conditioning treatment.

Michael cries at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t mean that he’s really sad, though. It’s more like an overflow of emotions. Negative, positive, both, neither—he doesn’t even know what he’s feeling half the time.

Right now, he’s feeling two things: sentimental and horny. Only he would be capable of shedding tears and getting hard at the same time.  

Gallant tries to come back into the room at the exact moment when Michael is slipping a sly hand into her panties, having bypassed the lacy hem of her dress. The look that he flashes the blonde hairdresser as he reenters with an armful of hair products is practically weaponized.

 _Go away_. _Now._

Luckily, no other clients are waiting for their cuts, colors, and Brazilian blow-outs; otherwise, the couple would have to rethink having their tryst in the middle of Mr. Gallant’s salon, deserted or not. Truth be told, Mallory can’t imagine a scenario in which even the presence of other clients would deter Michael from fucking once he’s started on that particular road. 

He wastes no time working her cunt open with his hand while using the other to keep her from squirming too much on his lap. He’s lifted up the bottom of her dress and slipped her panties down her legs, leaving them intact rather than ripping them off as he’s done in the past. Why? Maybe he’s being considerate, Mallory thinks—while she still _can_ think. In a few moments, rational thought will be a vague memory, as Michael’s long, many-ringed, and slightly calloused fingers slip even deeper between her wet folds.

They were forged in Hell, those fingers; then why do they feel so heavenly?

“You’re soaking wet,” he mutters into the crook of her neck as he pumps two digits in and out of her at the exact angle that elicits the loudest sounds from her sloppy, ravenous cunt. “All this for me?”

He says it like her being wet is an astonishing discovery, but it happens the same way every time.

Michael pulls his fingers out from her suddenly, leaving her empty and keening. The gesture serves a higher purpose, she discovers soon enough. Gathering liquid proof of her readiness, he lifts his hand up to her face and commands her to taste.

Mallory takes both fingers between her lips without breaking eye contact. Watching her swirl her tongue around his rings to lap up her own juices, his crystalline eyes turn cloudy, like the heavens before a sky-splitting storm.

“Are they clean?” His voice is gruffer now, less controlled.

“Yes, Sir.”

Once he’s finally had his fill of watching his fingers disappearing into her mouth, he returns to fingering her. He’s doing it more roughly than before now, even to the point of pain (the kind that’s indistinguishable from pleasure). One hand seeks her G-spot as the other makes sure that she’s still balancing on his lap, however awkward the position.

It’s a good thing that the chairs in Mr. Gallant’s salon are so sturdy. Michael and Mallory are no strangers to breaking furniture, but trashing a place of business with their lovemaking is a little déclassé, considering who they are: the son of the devil and his half-angelic bride.

Michael finds her clit with the roughened pad of his thumb and rubs small circles into the delicate nub. Still buried up to the rings, his index and middle finger start to curve, searching for that tender spot that makes her unravel.

When Mallory tips her head back in pleasure, it has the unintended effect of baring her throat. Michael takes advantage immediately by sinking his teeth into the soft flesh there like he’s some kind of creature of the night.

“Ow! Stop biting me.”

It comes out half-whispered, more a moan than a complaint. Predictably, he only bites down harder. Once he’s satisfied that he’s bitten her hard enough, he laves the tiny puncture wound with his tongue, healing it before it can leave a scar.

None of this is new to Mallory. They may disagree on just about everything, yet they always agree here, in the zone where words are superfluous.

Ever since the bombs fell, Michael has been eager to slip inside her at every opportunity—and all he sees are opportunities. Even in his sleep, he’s constantly rubbing his hardness against her stomach or ass, as if to remind her that, come morning, he’d be balls-deep the very moment she awakes.

He’s basically kept her legs open like she’s the only 24-hour convenience store left in the world, and it just happens to be have a bottomless Slurpee machine that he can guzzle from for days.

And she lets him. More than that, she craves it, she initiates it, and she’ll crawl on her hands and knees at all hours of the day just to get her fix of it.

The truth is that the new Mallory, the girl who lived through the apocalypse timeline with Michael, was so heartbroken by the loss of the world that she drowned her grief in the only distraction worth a damn anymore: strenuous sex.

Michael became the cause and the solution to all her problems. If she was addicted to his touch before, she melts at his merest proximity now. She’s undone by a single look. It’s pathetic, really. And yet it’s become as necessary to her as breathing.

In the deserted salon, Michael has had enough of her cunt swallowing his fingers and instead wants her unravelling on his cock. He swiftly frees himself from his pants before lifting her up to align himself with her entrance. He can’t wait another second—or so it seems.

When Mallory sinks down on his cock in one fluid motion, his hands grip her ass to anchor her there. She’s anxious to starting moving, but he pins her on his lap.

Fully seated inside her, Michael is suddenly in no rush to fuck. He wears a look of total bliss, all their disagreements forgotten. What’s this? If he wants a human-sized tea cozy to keep his dick warm, he’s going to have to find another girl or abandon the plan.

Mallory leans in for a deep kiss, hoping to rouse him from his calm state. But Michael’s not really calm. This is dominant behavior, only a variant of it that she’s never seen before.

Michael returns her kiss, tangling with his tongue with hers without letting her go. He’s denying her what they both want for the greater pleasure of watching her squirm on his cock. Smiling, he watches her try and fail to impale herself further, and he even laughs at her need.

“Michael… why aren’t you fucking me… I _need_ to feel you inside...”

She’s fully aware of sounding like a bad porno. She just doesn’t care.

“Patience,” he tells her. “Good things come to bad girls who wait.”

It’s hard on him too, this wait. Mallory can tell by the glazed look in his ice-blue eyes and the way that his grip loosens even as his nails dig into the pliant flesh of her ass. So why prolong it?

“The Black Mass is happening,” he whispers, brushing the shell of her hair with his lips before they migrate downward to her neck. Her misery finally ends when he bucks his hips to get her moving.

 _Bastard_ , she thinks as she begins to bounce up and down on his cock. She goes slowly at first to find the right angle and then, once they’ve found her magic spot together, their movements are faster, sloppier, wilder. 

“There won’t be any Black Mass,” she pants with some difficulty. Now that he’s finally giving her what she wants, it’s getting harder to argue.

“It _is_ happening,” he replies, slowly, deliberately, punctuating each syllable with a hard upward thrust. Normally, he would bristle at having such an insubordinate lover, but all is forgiven in the present circumstances. Her pussy feels _that_ good. Her moans are sweet music to his ears.

They’re both getting close. There’s a knot in her gut now, a need for release from the assault of pure sensation.

Michael’s eyes are closed. His wet hair clings to his brow. His face is buried in the crook of her neck. He’s groaning and calling her name. She hears him but has lost the ability to speak. Or else she’s babbling nonsense about sacrifice and demons. Either one could be true.

If they time it just right, they’ll cum together, going off the proverbial cliff like Bonnie and Clyde on one last joyride.

As Michael continues to pound into her from below and she bounces with abandon on his lap, the tinkling of the door chime invades her consciousness, followed by the sound of the door slamming shut. Mr. Gallant’s next hair appointment just made a swift exit.

The hairdresser himself knows better than to bother the couple, who live in their own little bubble most of the time, but they really should have put a sign on the door that reads “closed for lunch.”

When Mallory finds her voice again (but not her words), she’s cumming on his cock a second before his orgasm hits with a vengeance, painting her inner walls a color that no one can see.

“For the last time, Michael. There will be _no_ sacrifice.”

He smiles against her sweat-soaked skin, long hair tickling her neck.

“We’ll see.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is on indefinite hiatus until I find motivation to continue


End file.
